By the end of the story, O’Brien has dismantled the entire concept of a “true” war tale. The truth has a different set of rules when it comes to war, so many rules that there seem to be none at all. There are even true stories that “never happened,” because “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant” (89). O’Brien argues that just because something happens doesn’t make it true; it must matter that it happened, whether or not it did. His concept of truth may have more to do with a feeling, an acute understanding, rather than a momentary accuracy, like that captured by the click of a camera. O’Brien makes this point not only in this chapter but through the mere existence of his novel. The Things They Carried is fictional, but true. Creative, imaginative, artistic, but true. Maybe O’Brien actually “threw down the parts” of Lemon that got stuck in a tree after he was blown up, maybe his platoon mate sang “Lemon Tree” as they “peel[ed] him off,” maybe it kept him up at night years later (89). Maybe not. Either way, there’s no questioning its emotional integrity; it would be a failure of the reader to do so.
Even so, McCullin may feel the need to declare himself as separate from those like O’Brien, who construct their own fictionalized “truths,” no matter how grounded in reality they are. And yet, Anderson begins his review by comparing McCullin’s work to a series of prints by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, noting that McCullin’s photos “seem a modern incarnation” in their similarly brutal depiction of violence, along with their shared stoicism and resignation towards their subjects (Anderson). Goya’s series, called The Disasters of War, is “an assault on the sensibility of the viewer,” each violent image accompanied by a phrase that “badgers the viewer,” like “No se puede mirar” (“One can’t look,”) or, famously, “Yo lo ví” (“I saw this”) (Sontag). The artist’s early-nineteenth-century etchings are a practical example of war photography. As Susan Sontag writes in her essay “Looking at War,” “All the trappings of the spectacular have been eliminated: the landscape is an atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in” in order to “move the viewer closer to the horror.” Sontag suggests that this elimination is a necessary step for authentic, appropriately horrifying war photography—one that not all photographers abide by.
Sontag considers the case of Sebastião Salgado, who has been under fire for his photographs, which, although “spectacular,” “beautifully composed,” and “cinematic,” have garnered an audience in “highly commercialized situations” (Sontag). Sontag argues that the photographs themselves are problematic, noting that they capture the suffering of populations from an outside perspective and “focus on the powerless” without naming them: “Taken in thirty-five countries, Salgado’s migration pictures group together, under [a] single heading, a host of different causes and kinds of distress. Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it . . . invites [people] to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any . . . intervention” (Sontag). Sontag reasons that Salgado’s paintings are so “epic” and “vast’” that they dull and dilute the viewer’s empathy; our feelings “flounder” in that vastness and the subject’s suffering is made “abstract.” Sontag isn’t saying that beauty cannot exist in war; instead, she subscribes to Leonardo da Vinci’s philosophy on painting battle scenes: “The image should appall, and in that terribilità lies a challenging kind of beauty” (Sontag). All McCullin’s reviewers seem to agree; though room after room is filled with “masterpieces,” in truth his images are disturbing evidence of “crime scenes” (Anderson). Anderson notes the eerie nature of the Tate exhibit, the quiet “shuffling” of museum visitors among these piercing, horrifying images. Perhaps McCullin’s work feels safer in this comparatively sanitized context. The question now is why McCullin continues to protest claims of his own artistry when there is no doubt that his photography is absolutely, devastatingly true.
The camera lens’s focus rests eternally on a black and white photograph hung against the grey wall of the exhibit. Confined within the black picture frame, a boy with albinism looks out. He is starving to death. Not much else seems important to the image, not the holes in his sweater or the deck of cards he carries. There is the boy to his left, out of focus, whose hands rest on his head. He is starving. More boys gather further left and out of frame. They are starving. However, photographer Matt Dunham has brought our attention to someone else, someone outside of Don McCullin’s Albino Boy, Biafra, which is pictured hanging inside Tate Britain. It is a museum-goer, whose bald head is the only similarity between the photographed visitor and McCullin’s subject. Facing away from the camera, all that can be seen is his blurred but prominent figure engaged in an unmistakable act: his hands clasp and steady an iPhone, which glows to reveal a tiny image of the framed photograph as he takes a picture of his own (Searle).
And now I begin to understand.
In “Looking at War,” Sontag describes the famine McCullin photographed in Biafra as a “crime[] of the greatest magnitude.” Surely this photo of a photo doesn’t belong on an iPhone, nestled between pictures of last night’s dinner and dog sightings. The word “voyeurism” (Searle), thrown around sporadically in the exhibition reviews, takes on a new meaning. I can now visualize what Sontag calls a historical “iconography of suffering.” The suggestion that we have an “appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain” comparable to our “desire for ones that show bodies naked” is no longer just an idea on the page but a truth in an image (Sontag). In wrestling with this concept, the question of Don McCullin’s artistry—or lack thereof—feels distant, trivial, unseemly.
At the end of “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien shares that sometimes people will approach him and express that they were surprised they liked his war story, that it touched them; he responds in his head with the sharp words of a bereaved Rat Kiley: “You dumb cooze” because they weren’t “listening” (90). He sighs that again they weren’t “listening” and missed the point, and as such, the war stories must be told again and again, with new parts and people made up “to get at the real truth,” which is not really about war at all, but about “sunlight” and “love and memory” and “sisters who never write back and people who never listen” (91). I suppose I am one of those people, one of those who seeks an objective truth rather than an emotional one, a “real” one. You could be, too, if I’ve made you an accomplice in my questioning, my hypothesizing, my “indulg[ing] in abstraction [and] analysis,” and by doing so stripping away part of the truth (O’Brien 84). And the “truth” is the thing, the only thing. Right now, while I deliberate over all of this on my computer, a global pandemic rages and people are dying. I scroll through photographs of empty streets in New York. I am grieving a dear friend killed by COVID-19. I begin to appreciate that “The memory of war . . . is mostly local” (Sontag). I’m reminded of the picture of the Catholic boy from Londonderry, wooden plank in hand. It is only an image to me, one that I can study from a distance and search for some sort of meaning in. To someone else, it is their family’s history, a reminder of a time of loss, and little else. I begin to understand McCullin’s words, his continual resistance to the word “artist,” and his contradicting and ever-changing justifications. That maybe it comes not from a place of ego but from the knowledge, after sixty years of photography, that we struggle to hear him. Instead, we idolize, we take pictures of his pictures, and we analyze. McCullin is what Sontag considers to be a “morally alert photographer,”’ one who avoids the “exploitation of sentiment” at all costs (Sontag); he refuses to be confused with those who claim their work as art, as something that can be studied from different perspectives. In the current age of aestheticized, often untrustworthy news, McCullin is putting his foot down. There is no gray area in the death of a child. There are no two schools of thought in viewing a dying mother and her starving child. This is how it happened: “Asi sucedió.” McCullin’s only comment: “Yo lo ví.”
Works Cited
Anderson, Darran. “The Anti-Heroism in Don McCullin’s Photographs of Protest, Famine and War.” Frieze, 12 Feb. 2019, frieze.com/article/anti-heroism-don-mccullins-photographs-protest-famine-and-war. “Art.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, 2020, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/art.
Bond, Jessie. “Don McCullin on why he is showing at Tate Britain even though he is ‘not an artist.’” The Art Newspaper, 1 Feb. 2019, www.theartnewspaper.com/preview/tate-britain-celebrates-reluctant-artist-don-mccullin.
Kamber, Michael. “Don McCullin at War.” The New York Times, 6 Nov. 2015, lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/don-mccullin-at-war.
Marshall, Alex. “Don McCullin Is a War Photographer. Just Don’t Call Him an Artist.” The New York Times, 4 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/arts/design/don-mccullin-tate-britain.html.
O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried, Houghton Mifflin, 1990, pp. 73-91.
Rea, Naomi. “‘I Am a Photographer, Not an Artist’: Legendary War Photographer Don McCullin on Why the Distinction Matters.” Artnet, 4 Feb. 2020, news.artnet.com/exhibitions/don-mccullin-hauser-wirth-1766997.
Searle, Adrian. “Don McCullin review – witness for the persecuted.” The Guardian, 4 Feb. 2019, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/feb/04/don-mccullin-tate-retrospective-review#img-2.
Sontag, Susan. “Looking at War.” The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2002, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war.