Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography - Hardcover

McCullin, Don

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224102486 ISBN 13: 9780224102483

Publisher: Random House UK, 2015

Synopsis

"McCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about." --Times Literary Supplement
     From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every conflict up to the Falklands War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images.
     At the Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, McCullin's photography made him a new kind of hero. The flow of stories every Sunday took a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war Britain and into the recesses of domestic deprivation: when in 1968, a year of political turmoil, the Beatles wanted new pictures, they insisted on using McCullin; when Francis Bacon, whose own career had emerged with depiction of the ravages of the flesh, wanted a portrait, he turned to McCullin.
     McCullin now spends his days quietly in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes -- a far cry from the world's conflict zones and the war-scarred north London of Holloway Road where his career began.
     In October 2015, it will be twenty-five years since the first publication of his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour -- a harrowing memoir combining his photojournalism with his lifework.
     The time is right to complete McCullin's story.

About this title

About the Author:

DON McCULLIN grew up in north London. He worked for the Sunday Times for eighteen years and covered every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands War. The finest British photo-journalist of his generation, he has received many honours and awards including the CBE. He lives in Somerset.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework. A product of one of north London's tougher slums, McCullin came of age during the WW II blitz. Having returned to the old neighborhood and an animation-lab job following a hitch in the RAF (where he acquired an interest in photography), the author sold some shots of local gang members to The Observer. Further assignments resulted, and McCullin was off on a globe-trotting career that over three decades would take him to 120 foreign countries and more than two dozen wars--in Biafra, Cambodia, the Congo, Cyprus, El Salvador, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Vietnam, etc. During the years that he made a name for himself bringing home to newspaper readers the horrific realities of battle for noncombatants as well as front-line troops, the author narrowly escaped death on countless occasions. At once drawn to and repelled by the bloody violence whose heart of darkness he so graphically captured on film, McCullin marches to the beat of a different drummer these days. Leaving little doubt that his focus on the force of arms was as much a matter of circumstance as choice, he notes that somewhere along the line the UK press began covering lifestyles in preference to life. With his brand of stark images in disfavor, the author and his employer of 18 years (London's Sunday Times) parted company during the early 1980's. Meanwhile, McCullin lost his wife to brain cancer, further diminishing his tolerance for death and destruction. Today, the author rattles about a Somerset farmstead, trying to come to terms with a volatile past, restless present, and uncertain future. A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons, without self-pity, the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict. (Ninety-four powerful photographs.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0224102486
• ISBN 13: 9780224102483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 362