Don McCullin

Don McCullin, the world-renowned photojournalist, has said, 'Photography has given me a life.' Compassion is at the heart of his work. Shot and badly wounded in Cambodia, he has been imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. He has braved bullets and bombs, not only in search of the perfect shot, but to help dying soldiers and wounded civilians. 'The very least I could do was try and articulate these stories with the compassion they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster.' In 1993 he was awarded a CBE, later capped by a knighthood and a solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

Born in 1935, Don survived an impoverished North London childhood, further blighted by evacuation from the capital and the early death of his father. After National Service with RAF postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus, he returned armed with a Rolleicord twin-lens reflex camera. In 1959, aged 23, he showed The Observer his shots of the Guv'nors, a local gang he was friendly with, and gained his first commission. His first taste for war, in Cyprus in 1964, earned him a World Press Photo award, and for two decades war became a mainstay of his journalism, initially for The Observer, then from 1966 for The Sunday Times. Time and again he combined a mastery of light and composition with a bravery that pushed luck to its limits.

'I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer,' he has said. 'It suggests an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of others. I knew I was capable of another voice.' From the early 1980s, Don increasingly focused on more peaceful matters, in Indonesia, India and Africa. Now based in rural Somerset, in 2010 he published Southern Frontiers, a dark, often menacing record of the Roman Empire's legacy in North Africa and the Levant. Journeys across Roman Asia Minor records Rome's presence in Western Turkey.