Don McCullin
Photographed Vietnam, Biafra and Cyprus, and then went home to photograph the Somerset winter.
Don McCullin was born in Finsbury Park in 1935 and left school at fifteen with nothing; a photograph of a local gang, taken with a camera bought while doing National Service, was published by the Observer in 1959 and started the career. Over the following twenty years he covered Cyprus, the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland and Beirut, largely for the Sunday Times Magazine, and the shell-shocked marine and the starving Biafran mother are among the defining photographs of the period. Denied accreditation for the Falklands, he turned to English landscape, still life and the Somerset Levels in winter. He was knighted in 2017.
McCullin prints his own work in his own darkroom and has done so throughout, which is unusual and central to the value: a print made by him is the object collected, and the printing is deliberately dark and heavy. Print date matters as much as negative date, and later prints of famous images are common and are not vintage. Editions vary between images and some early prints were not editioned at all. Signature is normally in pencil on the verso or the mount, and gallery documentation is the usual reference.
If you own a work by Don McCullin
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.