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Recent books of photographs

Christopher Howse

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

Christopher Howse

In England by Don McCullin (Cape, £35) is, as might be expected, more gritty than pretty. Yet it is approachably humane compared with his famous war photography, where from Vietnam to Beirut the horrors are as terrible as Goya’s.

McCullin escaped the London gangland of Finsbury Park by means of the photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book. It shows The Guvnors, a gang of young men with whom he had grown up, posing in the sun in their sharp Fifties Sunday suits and thin ties on the beams of a half demolished house. One of them was hanged after a policeman was knifed; McCullin sold his picture to the Observer, and set off into a wider world of war.

In England represents the gaps between foreign assignments: potato-pickers in Hertford- shire in 1961, looking for all the world like Romanian migrants today; in Whitechapel, from the same year, a headscarfed homeless woman sitting on a bed next to shabby suitcases opposite her five grubby children on a bunk; from Liverpool in the 1970s a child running over shiny black streets, between spaces where houses once stood.

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