In a documentary on BBC2, celebrated war photographer, Don McCullin, discusses some of the harrowing images of war and man’s inhumanity to man that still haunt him. He has turned to landscape photography as a way of forgetting.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate [these harrowing memories]. I’m just going to photograph landscape. The English landscape is my heaven. But the one thing that upsets me about it is that there’s always a threat surrounding the things you love. When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, I think a tree is dying. When there’s pheasant shooting I think there’s going to be some blood somewhere. The gunfire immediately switches on another part of my nervous system. I feel that as much as you try to run away from these things, someone always presses a button and says ‘here’s a reminder of what you used to do.’
Towards an Iron Age hill fort, Somerset, 1991. Don McCullin
Peter Coles 