Don McCullin
1968
Tet Offensive, Hue (Fallen North Vietnamese soldier, his personal effects scattered by bodyplundering soldiers)

Gelatin silver print
16 1/2 x 11 3/4 ins
 
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© Don McCullin/Contact Press Images
 
English spy novelist John Le Carré considers the effect of existential angst on photographers and viewers: "The dead and nearly dead, like the mad, are free, but their freedom is no use to them. I expect that McCullin has committed suicide through his camera many times. . . . If it is possible as Albert Camus insists that it is, to feel, without romanticism, nostalgia for lost poverty, then perhaps it is also possible to feel nostalgia for physical suffering as a form of human nobility from which our good luck too frequently withholds us."
 
John Le Carré, intro. To Don McCullin, Hearts of Darkness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), 19.
 
LL/33288