Assignment 4 – another candidate

I have another candidate as the subject for the 1000-word essay. I first saw Don McCullin’s image of a Teddy-boy gang in a bombed-out house some decades ago, when he had a regular column in on of the photographic hobby magazines (I believe it was Amateur Photographer) when it struck a chord as a parallel with my father’s (a direct contemporary of McCullin) stories of growing up in and after the London Blitz. I encountered it more recently when reading his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour (McCullin 2002), which tells the circumstances of making the image and of its becoming his first published photograph.

This is an image that has not been ‘analysed to death’ but has scope for extended comment under the Barrett (2006) headings of description, interpretation, evaluation and (to a lesser extent) theorising. 1000 words should be possible.

References

Barrett, T.M. (2006) Criticizing photographs: an introduction to understanding images. 4th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McCullin, D. (2002) Unreasonable Behaviour London: Random House