Critical Evaluation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Critical Evaluation - Essay Example McCullin, Don, "Don McCullin in Syria, December 2012" Don McCullin, internationally known British photojournalist, is majorly renowned and known for his war photography and post-war coverage especially for his visit to Syria at the age of 77. His work features 134 exceptionally taken photographs that cover world's most dangerous and conflicted images. For the first time, the work of a British photojournalist is being exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) till April 14, 2013. Major newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer have also printed his works. McCullin has always depicted the unemployed, the impoverished and the downtrodden. NGC director and CEO Marc Mayer reported to have said, "McCullin's photographs belong in an art gallery because they consistently bring clarity and compositional grace to their compelling subject matter. These pictures are both hard to look at and hard not to" (Mallet, 2013). However, his recent e ncounter of Syria has not been displayed in the gallery, as Sobey Curatorial Assistant Katherine Stauble writes, "Likely (these images) were not meant to hang on a gallery wall, but rather, to communicate information, to reveal truths and to mobilize action. Now that McCullin has escaped the battlefield and for the past twenty years has been focusing his lens on landscape and still life, one might expect the artist moniker to sit more comfortably with him" (as cited in Mallet, 2013). The following attached files are few of pictures of his last war with Anthony Loyd: Figure 1: Anthony Loyd  and Don McCullin  Atmeh, on the Syria-Turkey border. According to McCullin, "Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. 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" (Mallet, 2013). This is what has been the most predominant feature of McCullin's photography as shown in Figure. 1. There has been embedded in his pictures "the feelings of people" rather than focusing on the other artistic values (figure 1). He, through his images, has tried to get the sympathetic feelings for the affected people. By capturing a child's picture, he is making use of emotions and feelings of people to get attention. As Susan Sontag writes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), that sufferings and emotions sell more than any other factors (Sontag, 2003). Figure 2: Don McCullin for The Times. The most effective and credible advantage of McCullin's work (as shown in Figure. 2) would be his unbiased reporting. He not only showed images of the public dying and their sorrows, but he also showed the sorrows of the free Syrian army (Figure 2). "I'm just a carrier pigeon that brings the message back home" (Archer, 2013), says McCullin. Thus, effectively, his images do not downplay the role of one opposing army to another nor do they cast blame on any side. His images can nev er prove to be the barriers against peace-making between the conflicted armies (Greenslade, 2013). The images represent war in a way that they do not exploit people nor do they express problematic ideas that would exacerbate the situation and/or the relationship between photographer and his subject (figure 2). Figure 3: McCullin in Syria McCullin's photography explicitly points out at the major weakness of his images which was the portrayal of sufferings of the evicted people as shown in