Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography

A close-up autobiography of a photojournalist who has acted as a war correspondent around the world tells of how his youthful excitement in covering battle faded as his pictures became more and more powerful.

Legendary British photojournalist McCullin ( Hearts of Darkness ; Beirut: A City in Crisis ) has captured the essence of war on film in the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan. His engrossing autobiography includes 94 examples of his powerful images. Typical of his compassionate yet unsparing work are photographs of a Biafran officer lecturing one of his dead soldiers and of an inmate in a Beirut insane asylum carrying a handicapped child to safety. Aided by freelance writer Chester, McCullin recreates his childhood in London's mean streets and tells us how he got his first assignment. The majority of the book, however, evokes the sad, grim and ghastly moments he brought into focus through his viewfinder and the heavy personal price he paid for those pictures: malaria, broken bones, shrapnel wounds, death threats and a traumatic stint in Idi Ami's most sinister prison. Neither sentimentality, self-pity nor self-congratulation soften the harrowing story of McCullin's quest for the perfect war picture.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.