Life, Death and Everything in Between presents key photographs by Don McCullin. The book aims to be neither a retrospective nor definitive publication, but to present a selection of images valued by McCullin with the benefits of both hindsight and wisdom, encapsulating his prolific, varied and ongoing career. The book opens with McCullin’s documentary photographs made in London in the 1950s, followed by reportage made in conflicts across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia. More recent photographs in the book link the legacy of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean and the latest, previously unpublished landscapes made near his home in Somerset.

Don McCullin (b. 1935) grew up in Finsbury Park. He began taking photographs during his military service and brought his camera back with him to the UK, beginning what would be a life-long commitment to photography. In 1961 he travelled to Berlin just as the wall was being installed and built, and his resulting photographs earned him a contract with The Observer newspaper and his first Press Award. He has worked for major British newspapers during some of the most violent conflicts of the late twentieth-century. He showed war as it really was throughout his career and time spent in Biafra, Bangladesh, Lebanon and the so-called ‘troubles’ in 1970s Northern Ireland. Despite vowing to stop photographing conflict in 1979, he continued, periodically, documenting the Kurds in Iraq in the early 90s, the second Iraq War in 2003, and more recently, Syria. In addition, he has produced an elegiac body of work for over forty years of the British landscape.