Don McCullin - Finsbury Park, London (1961)

Le vide-grenier du dimanche. Deux clichés de l'anglais Don McCullin (b.1935).

Photography is the truth if it's being handled by a truthful person. The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure.

DMC - Early morning, West Hartlepool
(1963)

Considéré comme l'un des plus grands photographes de guerre, il s'est aussi attaché à documenter la classe ouvrière, celle du nord de l'Angleterre, de West Hartlepool et de Bradford, ou encore les sans-abri de l'Est de Londres, la ville où il a grandi.

Ses réflexions sur son propre travail, sur sa pratique, révèlent la profondeur et la complexité des sentiments qui ont pu tirailler ce témoin de la souffrance humaine - le torturer même - dans l'exercice de son art.

I have been manipulated and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying by starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: "I didn't kill that man on the photograph, I didn't starve that child". That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.

Mais c'est lui aussi, qui raconte qu'un jour il a rencontré en Afrique une femme qui lui confie avoir voulu devenir médecin après avoir vu un de ses clichés; et il conclut cette anecdote en disant : "Voilà, c'est tout ce que je demande. Juste un médecin en Afrique."