The earliest picture in this retrospective of Don McCullin’s career was taken in 1960 and the most recent in 2022. McCullin will always be pigeonholed as a “war photographer” because of the searing images he took in places like Vietnam, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, and Biafra. Many of his best-known photographs from such conflicts are included in this collection. The grieving Turkish widow, the shellshocked American soldier in Vietnam, the starving child in Biafra holding an empty corned beef can – pictures that shocked the world at the time and still have enormous power fifty or more years after those particular horrors were recorded. New battlegrounds have replaced the old, but the horrors persist. The grief, starvation, mutilation, and death that war and famine bring never go away. McCullin, who will be 90 this year, has turned his lens in recent times away from the war zones, choosing to focus in old age on landscapes and ancient monuments.

McCullin’s subject has always, it seems to me, been the resilience, dignity, and fragility of people tested to their limits by the cruelties and horrors imposed on them by their fellow human beings. What he has seen and recorded are experiences that words cannot describe. We need pictures to get anywhere close to those experiences and their meaning. That has been McCullin’s mission for more than sixty years and no one has done it more powerfully.