Shaped By War-photographs by Don McCullin at IWM

Out of the 4 exhibitions we visited on our trip to Manchester, the one that had the most impact on me was Don McCullin's exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. At the time, i thought i would find this one the least interesting as documentary/war photography is not of any particular interest to me-i appreciate it, but its not one of my favourite genres. But i was blown away by this exhibition, left speechless and humbled, and incredibly touched.






The depth of human suffering that McCullin portrays is incredible, the first photograph above reduced me to tears when i saw it, and even writing about it now gives me a lump in my throat (I'm far to empathic, especially when it involves children) i cant help but think about the desperate situation that mother is in, about the pointless suckling of her baby, it absolutely breaks my heart. The same applies to the photograph of the starving albino child. i know that it is hard being a child in a famine but i also know that albino children are shunned, castigated and mistreated and i cant help but think about this poor child's plight. the visual style that McCullin uses is very direct, completely unapologetic, it says to me 'this is the situation, you can do nothing but learn from it' (whether people do learn from these things in any great capacity is something i am skeptical about).

On a technical level, i found the photograph of the shell shocked soldier the most interesting-to read all McCullins notes on how he processed the image, right down to the dodging and burning, made me realise how much post production goes into a genre i previously thought was the purest. McCullin still edits his photos, but at the end of the day, his photos still show the truth, the harsh facts of war and the human plight behind them.

i went away from this exhibition with a completely changed opinion of war photography, i don't know how McCullins work will impact my own, as i don't practise documentary photography on the whole (apart from weddings but thats a completely different style) but he most certainly influenced me emotionally and academically as it has opened my eyes to that style of photography. He doesn't just document the soldiers, the war, he documents the human face behind it all and his popularity undoubtedly opened the eyes of many many people to the suffering of others in all parts of the world. I never thought for a second that he would impact mine just as much, many years later.

Places-Familiar

Having been brought up in Burnley from a young age, Pendle Hill has always been in the background of my life, both in actuality and figuratively. For the 'familiar' section as part of the 'Places' brief i decided to explore photography of Pendle as, despite living around it for the majority of my life, and being immersed in the legends of the area (in particular the Pendle Witches-especially as my daughter is a descendant of Alice Nutter) i have a surprisingly small amount of photographs of it. Although i'm not originally from Burnley, I have always felt a deep connection with Pendle Hill and still to this day it can take my breath away with its beauty. I am clearly not the only person who has felt a connection with it, as in 1642 George Fox-the founder of the Quakers-claimed to have a vision whilst on top of the hill.

"As we travelled, we came near a very great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered."

Photographs of Pendle by other photographers.





I do like these images but i feel most of them are missing a certain 'something', a dramatic element fitting with Pendles great and sometimes bloody history. I will be doing research into a few famous landscape photographers who's work I admire and their techniques to try and find some inspiration for my own photographs.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984)




Ansel Adams was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his landscapes of the Deep West. He developed the 'Zone System' as a means to determine proper exposure (very simplistically-expose for the highlights and process for the shadows in one shot) This technique gave Adams' photos a clarity and depth that makes his photos immediately recognisable. I don't know if i have the right technique or, indeed, the talent to make a photograph in that way (landscapes being particularly difficult to expose due to the difference in the shadows and highlights) but I will be trying this technique along with a more modern and simpler version which is to take 2 shots, one exposed for highlights and one for shadows, and combine them both in Photoshop to bring out the best in both.

I adore Adams' way of capturing shadows and highlights in landscapes, and his insistence on capturing each scene with only one frame both inspires and scares me-my affectation for digital photography means i might take dozens of shots for only one picture and i intend on using Adams' influence to try and reduce the number of exposures i make.

I think Adam's use of Black and White is one of the things that makes his work so recognisable, it is definitely something i will be exploring in this part of the brief but i do think i will end up working with colour, as the colour of Pendle and the sky at sunset is one of the more breathtaking views of the Hill.


For my 2nd familiar place, i was inspired by David Chandler's 'Landscape of Disappointment'. Instead of going for a positive, homely place for my shot, i decided to take Chandlers more melancholy aspect of his essay and apply that to my shot. I am particularly inspired by Walker Evans after seeing some of his photographs in 'The Ongoing Moment'

Walker Evans (1903-1975) was best known for his Farm Security Administration photographs documenting the effects of the Great Depression. I love his photographs of doors, of open doors inside buildings and closed ones without. One of my very first ever 'proper' photographs (i.e. one where i purposefully paid attention to the composition and details, although i was far too inexperienced for aperture or shutter speed!) was of an open door with a view of another through it, and its only now, when i look back, do i see the similarity to Evan's work (pure coincidence though of course!)

Examples of Evan's work:



I will be visiting some of the houses I have lived in around the Burnley area to see if i can find inspiration and if any of my old homes fire that creative spark.

My Work

For my image of Pendle, I walked up the large hill behind my house just before sunset and took lots and lots of images. I set my camera to record 3 different levels of exposure (-2, 0 and +2) so that i could try my hand at a genuine HDR image-previously, i have only ever done HDR by making exposure-adjusted copies of one photograph. I used a tripod to make sure there was no discrepancies between the images, and used a cable release to trigger the shutter so there was no camera shake, especially on the longer exposures. I then went through the photographs in lightroom and chose the shots that i think would look the best as HDR images.

Contact Sheets


i chose the images i thought would make the best HDR, showed the 3 exposures and the HDR generated at the end, using Photomatix and Lightroom.


i picked 4 out of the 5 HDRs and put them on a contact sheet so i could compare them easily. Each image was very different, considering they were all taken within the same hour.

and this is my final image:


i chose this one mainly because of the sense of scale. The towns of Nelson and Barrowford can be seen at the base of Pendle, and at the very bottom of the image, the new school Pendle Vale, which is just a few minutes away, is seen. considering how large the new school building is, it really goes to show how much Pendle looms over my hometown. The HDR works well as it is showing the detail in the towns and buildings and the intensity in the sky which wouldn't be possible with just one exposure. On the whole, i am pleased with this image, although I do think it is probably the weakest out of my places set, which is ironic as it is the first of the places brief i decided on!



Familiar Image 2


As i stated before, I have lived in Burnley and the surrounding for the majority of my life, despite being born in Manchester. I see the old houses I have lived in fairly frequently but none of them created any sense of familiarity, discontent or that faint melancholy of Chandlers description, so i broadened my horizons slightly. I visited Burnley Wood, a place that is among the 5% most deprived areas in the country. I have lived in several houses around this area, but it wasn't until i came across my grandmothers house that I realised i had found my photographic subject. I haven't seen my Granny for around 8 years, and the last time i did, she didnt know who i was or any of my siblings. Not through dementia or any other old-age illness, but because she simply does not care. I spent many many hours in her house whilst my mum was at work, banished with my sister to the front room, sitting on her floral carpet and reading the Enid Blyton books I had brought with me. We were not allowed to leave the room, make noise or run about. Me and my sister would do everything in silence, playing, fighting, crying. As children we were to be invisible, there were no grandmotherly kisses and cuddles, no 'dont tell your mum!' packets of sweets.

It pleased me to see the house boarded up and marked for demolition. I have no good childhood memories of this house. I had no idea that my Granny didnt live there any longer (although I have been informed she is still alive) and that it was boarded up. I loved the fact the door was boarded up with bits of wood rather than the heavy metal doors which normally marks the abandoned properties in this horrible part of Burnley. I intend to revisit the site in a few weeks time and see if its been demolished yet.

I had recently finished 'The Ongoing Moment' and found that works i found in this book influenced a lot of the photography I produced for the Places brief. I was inspired by the photography of Walker Evans when photographing this house, as discussed in the research part of my blog.

Contact Sheets


i took a small series of images of the property, holding the camera by hand, mainly using the rule of 3rds to compose the door and the window. because i already knew what compositional style i wanted to use for this photograph, i only needed to take a few shots til i got what i wanted.

as you can see, i chose the 3rd image from my contact sheet. i edited the image in lightroom, cropping and rotating it slightly, and converting it to a high-contrast black and white with some more black added and the clarity raised. I love the way this image has edited up, how the textures in the wood and brick have become more evident. I'm really pleased with this image!

Places-Foreign or Alien

I spent many a stressed-out hour trying to decide what to photograph for the 'Alien or Foreign' part of the places assignment, i found it very difficult to think of a place that inspired me. Eventually, i remembered the 'Singing Ringing Tree', a wind powered sculpture resembling a tree that is found on one of the hills overlooking Burnley. Designed by architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu. It is 3 metres tall and built from galvanised pipes, some architectural or supporting, and some purely to create sound.

I decided, rather than do photograph it from a distance away showing all the country and town below it, to try and photograph it a little more abstractly, so you can't necessarily tell what it is or what its purpose serves. I chose it because it IS alien, a man-made object placed in a very prominent position, the noise it creates (which, sadly, cannot be recreated through photography!) is very eerie, discordant and uncomfortable, and that also inspired my decision to photograph it. Its supposed to be singing and ringing, but i find the noise to be howling and shrieking to be honest!

Contact Sheets



here you can see the shots i took of the singing ringing tree. Some from further away and some a little close, and one through the actual tubes viewing the windmills on the opposite side.


Here are my final two picks alongside the final edits.


i love this, its so abstract, it was taken upwards against the sky to create the feeling that the pipes are advancing over the screen. i love the dark section at the right compared to the bright on the left.




With this one, i took the 'Alien' part of the brief quite literally! I thought the curves of the side of the tree looked like the organic-like curves of a spaceship, and edited in a way to disguise the blue tones of the metal tubes.

Places-WIlderness

Again, with this project i was influenced by 'The Ongoing Moment' and in particular the photographs by Michael Ormerod


(and a couple of other images in the book by Ormerod that are not found on the internet)
and by other images by Lange, Winogrand and Frank




I love the lead in lines of the road in some of them and the expanse of almost nothingness that features in each photo.

When i received this brief i knew EXACTLY what i was going to photograph it, and my inital reaction did not change at all.

My first photograph was taken at the old Padiham Power Station, of the wasteland in front of the main building that use to house the power station towers. The location is surrounded by countryside but the expanse in front of the building is just wasteland as far as the eye can see. But wasteland is not very interesting to photograph, so i tried to take it from a different perspective.

Contact Sheets


I decided to try and photograph the wasteland through the huge and empty windows on the 2nd floor of the abandoned building. I attempted to use a flash (which is not one of my strong points at all) to try and capture some of the detail on the inside of the building, but i found that this didnt work at all, there was too much information for the eye to take in and no real defined focal point.

I whittled the choice down to 4 and picked my favourite based on composition and how pleasing it was to the eye, no mean feat when photographing something as banal as a bit of wasteland!


My final shot, before and after editing. I chose this one because of the darkness of the inside walls, it feels like you are looking at a picture within a picture and i like this effect a lot. the wasteland outside is in focus and shows a lot of detail, both in the sky and on the ground, and i was pleasantly surprised at how well this turned out.


For my 2nd shot, i was again influenced by the photographers above, especially in terms of the lead in lines from the road, and again i knew what i was going to photograph. Burnley is a very deprived town and a lot of the old derelict houses are being knocked down, especially in the area that i was living in until last year-i got a bit of a shock when i took a drive down to find 4 or 5 streets missing, and every time i go past some more is gone. So i decided to photograph one of these missing streets alongside some of the still-standing houses using the road as a focal point.

Contact Sheets

The bottom 3 images are individual images taken from slightly different angles but, on the spur of the moment-and mainly because we had a very dramatic sky-i decided to take 3 exposures of the same shot and see how the scene would look in HDR.


I was very very glad i decided to make 3 exposures of this scene when it came to editing. This shot, i think, looks great as HDR, the effect is subtle (i dislike over-processed HDR images) and i think works very well indeed.

Places-Urban

As with a lot of the other projects for the Places brief, i took a lot of influence from 'The Ongoing Moment' and Walker Evans and his doors as shown in my 'Familiar' places research here.

For my first shot, i had spotted the blue door several months before this assignment was given to us, and i knew when i read it, it would be perfect. It is located directly in the middle of the town centre, on the side of a mostly empty building. The cornicing, the peeling paint, i find it very beautiful.

For the 2nd, I had seen this abandoned building very close to the town hall in Burnley and decided, the day i photographed the blue door, to go and have a look and see if i could get in. It was remarkably easy, as part of the fencing was missing.

Contact Sheets


As you can see, i took several shots of the blue door at different angles and focal lengths, whereas the building near the town hall i only took a few. There was a very good reason for this, as will be explained with the 2nd contact sheet.


I decided on the first image at the very last minute. in fact, i had edited one of the other images ready to be exported when i had a change of heart. Even though my chosen image doesn't show the entire door like i originally intended, it has the added presence of one of the most prolific of the urban wild animals, the pigeon. The door is still in evidence, as is the peeling paint and the cornicing, but the pigeon i think turns this image from 'just any door' into a door that is located in an urban location. plus, it amuses me, and i love humour in photography!


the 2nd image was chosen as i preferred the portrait orientation over the landscape, as i wanted to draw attention to the fact that the abandoned building is so close to the bustling centre of town, you can read the time on the clock. the day is beautiful and clear, the town hall clock is ornate and beautiful, but just around the corner there is deprivation. in fact, this image was taken only a few streets away from my black and white image for the 'familiar places' brief.