Unreasonable Behaviour

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. We have now returned to the presses and expanded the original book in recognition of the photographer's eightieth birthday, with previously unpublished pictures from McCullin's unparalleled repository of images - the close fighting around the citadel at Hue during the Tet Offensive and the cholera victims in the floods during the Bangladesh crisis of 1971. The time is right to complete McCullin's story.