Twice Photographer of the Year and winner of both the Warsaw Gold Medal and the World Press Photographer Award, Donald McCullin is Britain's best and most famous war photographer. For more than a decade he has had an absolute compulsion to search out and photograph destitution and destruction, in Cyprus, Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, and, most recently, Uganda. He was wounded in Vietnam and says that his ten closest photographer friends have been killed. In this collection of his photographs, McCullin takes an unblinking look at war and the horrors it visits—with such absolute equality, with no distinction of race or religion—on men throughout the world. He also faces with a comparable steadiness of eye and hand the manifestations of suffering caused by agents more pervasive even than warfare, such as hunger. But joined to these almost unbearable shots of death and desolation are contrasting views of lyrical and nostalgic modes that affirm the enduring and undefeated life of humanity. The book in its wholeness is a poignant testimony to man's incredible capacity to survive his own inhumanity and even, sometimes, to triumph over it. The photographs are reproduced in duotone on high-quality paper, and the large format of the book (12 by 11 inches) allows for great flexibility in their display. The book is organized by locale—there are separate groups of pictures that were taken in England, Chicago, Cyprus, Bangladesh, India (including a series from the "House of Death" in Calcutta), Biafra, the Congo, Londonderry, and Hué (during Tet). An introductory group is designed to show how all of these, divergent as their subjects are, converge in McCullen's eye: it allows us to look at mankind from his personal point of view. Excerpts from the address Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote for the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize—entitled "Art—for Man's Sake"—serve as an overture that states full-voiced the themes implicit in the pictures. (Note: The MIT Press will publish this title instead of the previously announced American edition of The Destruction Business, since this new volume contains most of the photographs found in The Destruction Business, as well as some 50 additional photographs integrated into a new and larger format.)
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