Prisoner of war

Alice Inggs | The World of Interiors | 6th February 2026

McCullin, for decades a war photographer, brought defining images of 20^th century conflicts to British breakfast tables. As he tells it, that career was harrowing and, at times, left him feeling he had been “stealing from people’s lives by taking their images”. Nowadays he takes moody landscape images of Somerset and serene studies of Roman sculptures. These are arresting images but, observes one writer, “it is in proximity to devastation and death that McCullin’s work feels most alive.”