Shaped By War

British photojournalist McCullin's best-known images, which are included in this retrospective of his entire career, stem from wars of the 1960s and 1970s in the Congo, Cyprus, Vietnam, and Lebanon. A companion to a contemporary exhibit staged by Britain's Imperial War Museum, the tome contains text that somewhat overlaps with McCullin's autobiography (Unreasonable Behavior, 1992), but there are far more photographs included here. Word and picture initially explain how McCullin began, as a film developer in the Royal Air Force. Returned to civilian life in the late 1950s, he broke into photojournalism with street scenes of London and eventually was hired by the prestigious London Sunday Times, for which he took a picture that has assumed iconic status in Vietnam War imagery, in which a battle-weary U.S. Marine looks through the camera with a thousand-yard stare. McCullin describes the circumstances of its composition, as he does those of most photos reproduced here, typically reflecting on his feelings about covering combat and the risks he incurred.