Unreasonable Behavior

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From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every major conflict of his adult lifetime up to the Syrian Civil War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images. Revised and updated after twenty-five years, Unreasonable Behavior traces the life and career of one of the top photojournalists of the twentieth century and beyond. Born in London in 1935, McCullin worked as a photographer’s assistant in the RAF during the Suez Crisis. His early association with a North London gang led to the first publication of his pictures. As an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine beginning in 1966, McCullin soon became a new kind of hero, taking a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war domestic life through the lens of his Nikon camera. He captured the realities of war in Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and the human tragedy of famine and cholera on the Bangladesh border and later, the AIDs epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Already in 1968, when the Beatles wanted new press shots, they asked for Don McCullin. McCullin now spends his days quietly in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes—a far cry from the world’s conflict zones and the war-scarred north London where his career began. Harrowing and poignant, Unreasonable Behavior is an extraordinary account of a witness who survived to tell his tale and triumphed over the memories that could have destroyed him.From Publishers WeeklyLegendary British photojournalist McCullin ( Hearts of Darkness ; Beirut: A City in Crisis ) has captured the essence of war on film in the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Afghanistan. His engrossing autobiography includes 94 examples of his powerful images. Typical of his compassionate yet unsparing work are photographs of a Biafran officer lecturing one of his dead soldiers and of an inmate in a Beirut insane asylum carrying a handicapped child to safety. Aided by freelance writer Chester, McCullin recreates his childhood in London's mean streets and tells us how he got his first assignment. The majority of the book, however, evokes the sad, grim and ghastly moments he brought into focus through his viewfinder and the heavy personal price he paid for those pictures: malaria, broken bones, shrapnel wounds, death threats and a traumatic stint in Idi Ami's most sinister prison. Neither sentimentality, self-pity nor self-congratulation soften the harrowing story of McCullin's quest for the perfect war picture.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews





Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework. A product of one of north London's tougher slums, McCullin came of age during the WW II blitz. Having returned to the old neighborhood and an animation-lab job following a hitch in the RAF (where he acquired an interest in photography), the author sold some shots of local gang members to The Observer. Further assignments resulted, and McCullin was off on a globe-trotting career that over three decades would take him to 120 foreign countries and more than two dozen wars--in Biafra, Cambodia, the Congo, Cyprus, El Salvador, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Uganda, Vietnam, etc. During the years that he made a name for himself bringing home to newspaper readers the horrific realities of battle for noncombatants as well as front-line troops, the author narrowly escaped death on countless occasions. At once drawn to and repelled by the bloody violence whose heart of darkness he so graphically captured on film, McCullin marches to the beat of a different drummer these days. Leaving little doubt that his focus on the force of arms was as much a matter of circumstance as choice, he notes that somewhere along the line the UK press began covering lifestyles in preference to life. With his brand of stark images in disfavor, the author and his employer of 18 years (London's Sunday Times) parted company during the early 1980's. Meanwhile, McCullin lost his wife to brain cancer, further diminishing his tolerance for death and destruction. Today, the author rattles about a Somerset farmstead, trying to come to terms with a volatile past, restless present, and uncertain future. A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons, without self-pity, the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict. (Ninety-four powerful photographs.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.