Unreasonable Behavior: An Autobiography

From the construction of the Berlin Wall through every conflict up to the Falklands War, photographer Don McCullin has left a trail of iconic images. Revised and updated after twenty-five years, Unreasonable Behavior traces the life and career of one of the top photojournalists of the twentieth century and beyond.

Born in London in 1935, McCullin worked as a photographer’s assistant in the RAF during the Suez Crisis. His early association with a North London gang led to the first publication of his pictures. As an overseas correspondent for the Sunday Times Magazine beginning in 1966, McCullin soon became a new kind of hero, taking a generation of readers beyond the insularity of post-war domestic life through the lens of his Nikon camera. He captured the realities of war in Biafra, the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia, and elsewhere, and the human tragedy of famine and cholera on the Bangladesh border and later, the AIDs epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. Already in 1968, when the Beatles wanted new press shots, they asked for Don McCullin.

McCullin now spends his days quietly in a Somerset village, where he photographs the landscape and arranges still-lifes—a far cry from the world’s conflict zones and the war-scarred north London where his career began. Harrowing and poignant, Unreasonable Behavior is an extraordinary account of a witness who survived to tell his tale and triumphed over the memories that could have destroyed him.