Don McCullin's view of England is rooted in his war time childhood and in growing up in Finsbury Park, north London, in the fifties. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighbourhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder. The boys were his childhood friends. McCullin has always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion. In England combines some of his greatest work with many previously unpublished photographs and an entirely new body of pictures.
McCullin sees in his native country a perpetual social gulf dividing the affluent and the destitute. He continues in the same black-and-white tradition as he demonstrated between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the sixties and seventies, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he'd just escaped. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the poor is as defined as ever. This time he adds wry humour to his lyricism, as if the nation is as absurd as it is tragic. At the heart of it all is McCullin's deep love of the English landscape. He transforms his views of the hills and fields of Somerset beneath dark, raging skies into the battlefields of his imagination. It is here he feels completely at home.