PhotoOomph by Joshua Cunningham

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get in to the sold out Don McCullin talk at the

  "Photography Show", after a very busy weekend I turned up as early as I could on the Tuesday and heading straight for the box office (with only my bank card and €20), to be told the event had completely sold out, I was gutted but I was there now so time to make the best of the day. Had a great catch-up with the team at Panasonic and Olympus meeting some fantastic photographers and adding them to the Photographers Project (New blog update coming soon(an old update of the project can be found here) 

However I decided to chance it and head over to the Super Stage and see if I could find a spare ticket, or just really see how it goes. It started out great, getting there early enough I managed to get a glimpse of him and then once he had finished what he was doing he came over to have a chat with the people that were there waiting (we were there around 30/40 minutes early) and during that time I was able to both get my book signed (Shaped by War) and add him to the Photographers Project. 

Anyway my luck did not stop there, thinking about it now I should of perhaps got a Lottery ticket that night, ah well. But the lovely lady (who was much more helpful than the box office lady) recommended waiting around and seeing if anyone had spare tickets to give away or sell, so I did I was second in line at this point having met a lovely lady, who was their for journalistic purposes and told me she'd had the same issue. Not long after the staff started checking tickets and seating people in the crowd, a couple came up with a spare ticket and away the journalist went taking up the spare ticket, I was next inline, a large number of people had now seemed to pass me and I was starting to worry that I was going to miss out on getting to see the talk, when a lovely couple who's dad wasn't able to make the show were introduced to me and told that I was next in line for any spare tickets if they were happy to do so, unfortunately they wanted paying, and were actually having to dash off before the end of the show, I was running out of options when I remembered the €20's I had in my wallet and on the off chance asked if they were heading to Europe any time soon as I had landed back from Barcelona the afternoon before and the only cash I had on me was in Euros, and I was in luck, they were and they were happy to accept €15 for the ticket (slightly more than face value but that didn't really bother me) it was settled I was in and ready to listen to the talk. 

During the talk I made several pages of notes, what a fascinating man he really is, what an amazing person to still be carrying on normal life after the horrific scenes he has witnessed. Below is a section of quotes and really just a small insight in to what I took from his talk. All images below are the property of Don McCullin and are only used below as reference to comments made during the talk. 

The talk started with Don talking a bit about himself and photography as whole saying "Once it gets a grip of you, (Photography), it never lets you go" he continued to say "I consider myself a student, once you stop that, you've lost it" and that "You will learn from others, as they learn from others" 

His life in Photography started in conflict albeit a much smaller form, but it was the conflict with the subject he took photos of, when he was building his confidence, by going out and shooting on the violence of the teenage gangs on the street. From there he moved on to cover a vast number of wars over 50 years. 

I plan over at least one more blog post to write about the comments made on some of the photographs shown to us. But for now I am going to leave it with a few more quotes and information that I gathered from the talk.

Don is a self confessed war junkie, he wanted his name (his fathers name) to mean something but feels after all this time, it has changed nothing we are in the same situation now, in wars where no one really wins. But despite this may be coming out of retirement for a second time to go out to the Middle East to capture the humanitarian side of the disaster out there at the moment, a subject which makes him really quite angry. 

Over the last however many year McCullin has always put himself in danger, both in terms of just being where he is, but also the preparation to take the shot saying

"Everything is quick, it would be stupid to get killed and be two stops under exposed"

However he has never been afraid humans, however he is scared of having his face ripped of by a shell. Which I cannot blaim him for to be honest, but what stuck with me is how he wanted to justify him self and his actions he said 

"I've always tried to be a decent humanbeing" 

This really stuck with me and I truly and honestly believed this, when he spoke about one particular photo, which will follow in another post.

I will finish, this post with two final points:

Firstly, he's "Defied going barmy, his life is tiny compared to what he has seen" and it's photography that has allowed to do this, he has moved to shooting landscapes on 5x4 film, this along with the darkroom and classical has helped him disciplin himself in the way it's a major disciplin to learn photography and the darkroom. 

Secondly, he wants to be a learning point for others like others were to him.m