Don McCullin’s 90th birthday last month was marked by three major public events: a retrospective at Hauser & Wirth in New York titled A Desecrated Serenity; a headline lecture at the Royal Academy in London; and a candid interview in The Guardian. Each celebrated his towering legacy but also exposed the contradictions that shape the fate of the artist—especially the working-class artist—under capitalism.

Born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, London, Don McCullin’s life and photographic work have been shaped by hardship, compassion, and an unrelenting pursuit of truth. Evacuated during the Blitz and forced to leave school at 15 after the death of his father, McCullin was largely self-taught, developing his photographic skills through personal initiative. These formative experiences imbued his work with emotional depth and a visceral sense of justice. “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling,” he once said. “If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”

During his National Service with the Royal Air Force, McCullin worked in the base darkroom and bought his first camera, a Rolleicord. Upon returning to London, he photographed a local gang, The Guvnors, in a bombed-out building. A friend encouraged him to show the image to The Observer, which published it in 1959—launching his career. “Frankly, I didn’t really know anything about photography… But after that famous picture of the gang was published, I was offered every job in England”, he revealed.

McCullin’s big breakthrough came in 1961 with his coverage of the Berlin Wall’s construction, earning him the British Press Award. His images of Checkpoint Charlie and divided families captured the Cold War’s emotional toll. In 1964, McCullin won another award for his first war assignment, documenting the Cyprus civil war—revealing his ability to frame tension and human vulnerability.

In 1966, McCullin was recruited by The Sunday Times, where he remained for almost two decades. His work under art director David King, a Trotskyist sympathizer, gave him unprecedented freedom to pursue assignments that combined artistic vision with uncompromising social truth.

During the 1968-75 period Britain was convulsed by mass strikes, student protests, and the broader international radicalisation that followed events like the May-June 1968 general strike in France, the Vietnam War, and uprisings in the colonial world—tumultuous events that culminated in the mass movement spearheaded by the miners’ strike that brought down the Conservative government of Edward Heath.

The Socialist Labour League, then the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International led by Gerry Healy, understood that the struggle to imbue the struggles of the working class with a socialist political consciousness necessitated paying attention to cultural questions. It won the support of a significant layer of artists, writers, and filmmakers and helped direct the work of the best of them towards addressing the struggles of the working class and the history of the revolutionary socialist movement.

McCullin was part of this milieu. His attraction to socialist ideas was part of this wider ferment, where photography was understood as means of revealing and indicting imperialism, exploitation and poverty rather than mere documentation.

Between 1965 and 1970, McCullin covered the Vietnam War, producing some of the most iconic images in photojournalism. His haunting photograph of a shell-shocked US Marine during the Battle of Hue became emblematic of war’s psychological toll.

He also documented the Congo Crisis and the Nigerian Civil War, capturing famine and displacement in Biafra, including a harrowing image of an albino child dying of starvation. “I was ashamed to be part of the human race,” he later said. “Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives.”

From 1971 to 1975, McCullin covered the spillover of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He commented, “Somebody may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares… I care, and I am going to photograph it.”

He also covered the Bangladesh Liberation War, and the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arab states. In Uganda under Idi Amin, he was arrested while documenting atrocities and narrowly escaped execution. In 1979, he covered the Iranian Revolution, which overthrew the Shah installed in the 1953 coup by US and British imperialism, capturing the fervour and fear of Tehran’s streets.

McCullin’s British work from the 1960s and 70s—depicting homelessness, slum clearances, coal miners, industrial decline—remains equally powerful. Portraits such as Homeless Irishman, Spitalfields (1969) are intimate, unflinching indictments of poverty. “There were many untold truths about this country… we had poverty, we had unemployment, we had a class system that wasn’t convenient,” he said in a 1989 BBC documentary.

McCullin’s series on homelessness revealed the rise of street sleeping due to austerity, mental illness, and the closure of hostels. “You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them,” he explained.

The early 1980s saw McCullin documenting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, photographing Mujahideen fighters backed by US support. He also covered the civil war in El Salvador and attempted to report on the Falklands War in 1982 but was denied access by the British government—a foretaste of embedded war reporting under military control.

During this period, McCullin’s editorial support eroded. Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sunday Times in 1981 was emblematic of the Thatcher-era counter-revolution against the working class. McCullin was ousted. A friend summarized the new editorial line: “No more starving third-world babies; more successful businessmen around their weekend barbecues.”

In 1982, McCullin documented the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camp massacres in Lebanon, where Christian Phalangist militias, with Israeli support, killed up to 3,000 civilians. His image of a Palestinian mother in her destroyed home—After the Massacre of Sabra Camp in Beirut—remains one of his most cited works. “I photographed the madness of men who had lost all sense of humanity,” he said.

These were McCullin’s final frontline assignments. After this, he largely withdrew from frontline conflict photography, citing exhaustion and disillusionment.

In 1984 he confessed, “There is guilt in every direction… That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.” He turned to haunting landscapes of Somerset, which he called his spiritual home, carefully constructed still life images and explorations of Roman ruins across North Africa and the Middle East.

In his Guardian interview McCullin expressed deep pessimism about his legacy. He described his life as “a cesspit” and lamented that his war photography had “done absolutely no good at all.”

This despair, the conviction that his photographs never changed anything, is not simply the voice of a man scarred by decades of trauma. It reflects a broader historical context: the betrayal of the working class by the Stalinist, social democratic and trade union bureaucracies. McCullin’s demoralisation was shaped by the historical defeats of the working class following the revolutionary optimism of the 1968–75 period, which had created conditions in which socialist ideas flourished. McCullin’s early conviction that photography could shock the conscience and expose injustice was inseparable from this revolutionary atmosphere.

The 1980s and 1990s, however, saw a decisive historical shift in the labour movement: a period of “renunciationism” among social democratic parties. Labour in Britain under Tony Blair renounced its reformist Clause IV commitment to public ownership and openly embraced the market. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet bureaucracy renounced even verbal allegiance to the October Revolution and undertook the restoration of capitalism and the liquidation of the Soviet Union. The academic imperialist apologist Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History”, proclaiming liberal democracy and free‑market capitalism as the final, universal form of human government. Trade unions became wholly integrated into corporate management as policemen of the working class, abandoning any defence of wages, jobs, or welfare.

The demoralisation of artists and intellectuals like McCullin reflected this collapse of the old labour movement, which they were ill-equipped to understand the root causes of, or to recognise the need to construct a genuinely revolutionary alternative in response.

This sense of futility deepened with the way in which photography became incorporated into an art market that is yet another playground for the super‑rich. Nearly one‑third of global billionaires hold collections averaging $300 million each.

McCullin’s own photographs now sell for relatively large sums—his shellshocked US Marine recently fetched nearly $32,000 at auction. But his conclusion that his work never changed anything is false. His images of poverty, war, and imperialist slaughter were born of Finsbury Park, of deprivation and struggle, of a Britain where workers fought for their dignity. His war photography was not passive documentation, but an indictment of capitalism.

Millions were educated by his lens. His photographs of Vietnam galvanized anti‑war sentiment; his documentation of homelessness exposed enduring class divisions; his images of Biafra, Beirut, and Northern Ireland forced millions to confront the brutality of colonialism and capitalist war. What happened subsequently was not the failure of his art, but of parties and programs that rejected and opposed the development of a revolutionary struggle against capitalism.

The task today is to reconnect art with revolution. In that struggle, unfolding amid an unprecedented global crisis and the political collapse of the old Stalinist and social democratic parties, McCullin’s photographs still provide a searing indictment of a system that must be overthrown.