Don McCullin: Down and Out in London and Rome
The starting point for this essay was the discovery of the poster reproduced here on a back street in Rome in 1994.
The recognition of the original image as a photograph of a down-and-out taken by Don McCullin in the East End of London led to an extensive exploration of the many different aspects of the picture and its history. And the discovery that this poster didn’t at all mean what I had assumed it meant.
The essay was published in Source, no.83 (Summer 2015) and my thanks to Richard West for the page design reproduced in this PDF. (NB: It was only recently that I noticed that the date of Blow Up is given wrongly; it should, of course, be 1964, not 1974.)
