When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that black-and-white portraits convey deep messages rather than merely pleasing the viewer.
Don McCullin's quote highlights the power of black-and-white photography as a medium for expression. He suggests that such portraits are not created for aesthetic pleasure, but rather to provoke thought and elicit strong emotional responses. The intention behind the artwork is to communicate a powerful message that challenges or confronts the audience, pushing them to engage with the deeper implications of the image.
In practice
During an art exhibition, to explain the intention behind my work.
I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.
I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with.
In my photography, I always lean towards the underprivileged because that's where I came from. When I went to the wars, I attempted to go and stand by those who were being trodden on. By that, I mean people like the Palestinians. When I go to India, I see really the poorest people, and I tend to be drawn to them.
I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.
Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.
I'm from England, and like every other great empire who stole bits of the world, there is a price to pay. And I was born in 1935. So, since I've been conscious of the world, I've either been in, or been on the periphery of, a war zone.
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other.
Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects, and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of colour. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.'
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.
Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.
Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something unexpected to offer and the job of acting is to pull it out of each other.
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