McCullin, McUnited, and Manchester

Any namby-pamby consideration of pixels and involvement are blown away by Don McCullin's show, Shaped By War, at the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester. I grew up looking at his images in the Sunday Times; his books are on my shelves; and a print of "Shell Shocked Marine" hangs on my wall. Yet his show still blew me away, as if I'd never seen a McCullin image before. This is in part because it's a fluent and encompassing selection but even more because the new prints (made by him) seem to bring a another level of impact to sometimes familiar images, smacking the viewer right between the eyes.

Thankfully, he has also included his more contemporary work in landscape and still life. They are beautiful photographs, serving to remind us that his skill was not just about being in the right place at the right time (perhaps substitute wrong here, given the subject matter) but also about having an eye that could discern what matters in any given scene, and an understanding of tone which drips with life.

At the risk of his ire, this is from the IWMN site.

Still life with Cambodian souvenirs, Somerset, 1985
hangs within touching distance of images showing the horror of war, and a metre round the corner from a cycling slide show covering a whole wall.  The exhibition is punctuated throughout by screens on which we can see and hear him talking about the process of taking these photographs.

The whole thing is mounted in such a way as to bring the visitor back to the beginning, a circular trip which demands repeat viewing.

As a lazy Londoner, I don't make a habit of taking the train to Manchester in order to see an exhibition of photographs.

More fool me. The museum itself is a fascinating building, the sort that we have far too few of down here.  It rises imperiously out of the hodge-podge of redeveloped wharves and toy-town industrial estate lumps.

By curious coincidence, Libeskind's only London building is about the same distance from  Arsenal's Emirates Stadium as this one is from Manchester United's Old Trafford.  Even as an ardent Gooner, I was impressed by Fortress United, although the rather scrappy poster that they were daubing all over the front yesterday doesn't touch the roll-call of heroes currently wrapping Ashburton Grove.

But it's certainly time for a statue of Monsieur Wenger, perhaps in the style of the one depicting Sir Keith Park which now graces the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. (See next post)

Manchester had even more to offer. I wanted to visit the Manchester Art Gallery to see the Ron Mueck room and the Goyas.

Another heart-warming surprise. It's exactly what a city gallery should be, and the citizens of Manchester clearly think the same. It was teeming with visitors, but not the sort you see in London Galleries - no straggling crocodiles of weary tourists here, no babbling in tongues. It seemed that every visitor other than me was a Mancunian.

The shop had rows of postcards showing classic Turners, not one of which I'd seen. Had I missed a room? No, apparently not; they're just Not On Display. It takes some confidence from a museum director to keep the Turners in storage, and show the Kitsch Victorians. It works.

The Goya prints were the best examples I'd ever seen - and Jake & Dinos Chapman's perverted toy soldiers were in the same room.

The only problem with Manchester appears to be travel: you can only get there by Virgin Trains - or, as I heard one local saying to his phone: "On the Virgin." It's a small price to pay.