In England

Don McCullin’s view of England is rooted in two worlds—his wartime childhood, and his youth in 1950s Finsbury Park. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighborhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder. McCullin always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion, and in this collection, he envisions his home country with its perpetual social gulf between the affluent and the desperate in mind. He continues in the same black and white tradition as he did between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the 1960s and 1970s, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he had just escaped. This book marks his return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer, adding wry humor to his famed lyricism. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the impoverished is as defined as ever, the nation as a whole as absurd as it is tragic.