In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE.

Away from war Don’s work has often focused on the suffering of the poor and underprivileged and he has produced moving essays on the homeless of London’s East End and the working classes of Britain’s industrialised cities. He is the author of a number of books, including The Palestinians (with Jonathan Dimbleby, 1980), Beirut: A City in Crisis (1983) and Don McCullin in Africa (2005). His book, Shaped by War (2010) was published to accompany a retrospective exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North, Salford, England in 2010 and then at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and the Imperial War Museum, London. His most recent publication is Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire, a poetic and contemplative study of selected Roman and pre-Roman ruins in North Africa and the Middle East.At home he has spent three decades chronicling the English countryside – in particular the landscapes of Somerset – and creating meticulously constructed still lifes all to great acclaim. Yet he still feels the lure of war. As recently as October 2015 Don travelled to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to photograph the Kurds’ three-way struggle with ISIS, Syria and Turkey. Das, P (January 2005), "Life interrupted—a photographic exhibition of HIV/AIDS in Africa by Don McCullin", The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 5 (1): 15, doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(04)01248-4, ISSN 1473-3099, PMID 15620555 The veteran war photographer [Don McCullin] has turned his lens to more peaceful scenes... for his latest book, The Landscape. The images carry a dramatic feel and a preference for stormy skies that reveal an intimacy with conflict and destruction.' Guardian

BBC Radio 3 – Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with Don McCullin" . Retrieved 25 November 2013. O'Hagan, Sean (7 February 2010). "Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 May 2018. I was blown away by the Don McCullin exhibition at the Tate Britain & so I’m devouring his autobiography... I also splashed out on the impressive book of pictures that accompanies the exhibition; beautifully shot, harrowing, very occasionally amusing pictures from a lifetime of photo journalism. While most of us were sheltering from Covid, Don explored the mountains, valleys and coast of western Turkey, hunting out the most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. He has created a meditation on landscape, the effects of light on ancient stone, the way clouds animate the past, but it is also inescapably about past conflict. About conquest, about imperium, about power.Don McCullin". Exploring Photography. Victoria and Albert Museum. Archived from the original on 10 February 2007 . Retrieved 31 March 2007. Devi pensare che stai rubando qualcosa che non ti appartiene di diritto. Stai rubando le immagini di altre persone."

After a career spanning sixty years, Sir Don McCullin, once a witness to conflict across the globe, has become one of the great landscape photographers of our time. McCullin’s pastoral view is far from idyllic. Though the woods and stream close to his house in Somerset have offered some respite, he has not sought out the quiet corners of rural England. He is drawn, instead, to the drama of approaching storms. He has an acute sense of how the emptiness of his immediate landscape echoes a wider tone of disquiet. The civil war in Cyprus was his first conflict and encounter with the dead in warfare. The power of his pictures showing the bodies of Turkish Cypriot men killed in their home was dependent upon him also showing their family’s vivid expressions of grief. It was in relation to this experience that he has spoken about the beginnings of “self-knowledge”, stepping away from feelings of resentment over his life being uniquely tough and “learning empathy”. He lets us into his head a little. His questioning of what he's doing and why he's doing it, especially after a particularly dark incident, is continuing. He seems to be suffering from being a survivor. Or perhaps being a witness unable - except occasionally - to act on what's happening in front of him is a whole different type of guilt.

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One,in particular,caught my attention.In Beirut,teenage boys play music and laugh while a corpse lies in the foreground.

The book is exciting to read and it is non-stop. I did feel sorry for his wife and children. How much real time did they get to spend with their husband/father over the long years, not to mention the anguish of worrying about the dangers he was exposed to in these far away lands. I photograph landscapes now. I’m not a man at peace. I still carry guilt and pain within me. Landscapes take my mind off all I’ve seen. It’s like therapy. It’s healing. The landscapes in Britain and Southern Frontiers occupy the final rooms of the retrospective. We see them after seeing all the horrors that McCullin has photographed—an aesthetic reward, of sorts. But at the same time this turn to the pictorial, is not that far removed from what came before. Pictorial form has always been central to his photography. McCullin, Donald; Lewis Chester (2002). Unreasonable Behaviour, An Autobiography. Vintage Books. pp.137–138. ISBN 978-0-09-943776-5. In November 2020, it was announced Angelina Jolie would be directing a biopic about McCullin, with Tom Hardy in the starring role. It is being adapted from McCullin's biography Unreasonable Behaviour by Gregory Burke. [21] Publications [ edit ] Émile Béchard, Femme du Luxor from McCullin's personal selection of photographs from the National Media Museum's collection, 2009.Peres, Michael R.; Osterman, Mark; Romer, Grant B.; Lopez, J. Tomas (2008). The Concise Focal Encyclopedia of Photography. Focal Press. ISBN 978-0-240-80998-4. I have long admired Don McCullin's heroic journey through some of the most appalling zones of suffering in the last third of the 20th century," Sontag wrote in her essay. "We now have a vast repository of images that make it harder to preserve such moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt us Seeing reality in the form of an image cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers." A day in the life of the Beatles: un giorno speciale con John, Paul, George e Ringo. Milan: Rizzoli. ISBN 9788817043793. Angelina Jolie to direct biopic of photographer Don McCullin starring Tom Hardy". The Guardian. 19 November 2020 . Retrieved 22 November 2020. Sir Don McCullin was born in 1935 and grew up in a deprived area of north London. He got his first break when a newspaper published his photograph of friends who were in a local gang. From the 1960s he forged a career as probably the UK’s foremost war photographer, primarily working for the Sunday Times Magazine. His unforgettable and sometimes harrowing images are accompanied in the show with his brutally honest commentaries.