Some of the pictures that Don McCullin took in war zones around the world are among the most well-known images of the 20th century.  Who can forget the shell shocked marine in Vietnam, the starving albino child in Biafra, or the grieving widows from the Cyprus civil war?  However familiar those pictures are, fifty years on they have lost none of their power to shock.  Walking around Tate Britain recently, it was deeply moving to see how the crowds of visitors were stunned into total silence by the war photographs. It seemed obvious that many of the visitors, especially the younger ones, had little or no experience of McCullin’s work, and the effect on many of them was clearly profound.  The galleries dedicated to his work in Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, and elsewhere were eerily silent as people gathered around the images, immersed in a suffering most of us will never experience directly.  McCullin’s vocation has been to connect the rest of us to the horrors of the last fifty years, creating a heroic, truthful, and ultimately beautiful body of work that stands as remembrance, testimony, and indictment.