This month, King and Country gave us the VN128 - Wounded!, a set that is a tribute to McCullin’s work. However, their official description for the product is a bit short. It is time to add more details…

Sir Don McCullin is a British photographer born in 1935 who, during his still active career, covered many major crises. He covered many wars, including the Northern Ireland conflict, the war in Cyprus and the 1956 Suez Crisis. McCullin even tried to reach the Falklands when the trouble began, but was forced to stay home as ships were all at full capacity. He also did more casual jobs and even did a photoshoot of the Beatles. However, this is for his photographs during the Vietnam War that he is in this blog today as it was one of his most highly regarded works.

A picture of Don McCullin taken in 1964 when receiving the World Press Photo Award at Amsterdam.

During that time, he joined a company of US marines who fought for two weeks and ended up with very high casualties. After those two weeks, less than a third of their original number was still able to fight. McCullin, despite not being an official part of this American company, became recognized as “one of them” after that. Captain Myron Harrington reported that, even if McCullin did not fight, he helped many times in rescuing wounded soldiers on the frontline. Amongst the picture he took when he was with the US marines, there is one showing a wounded soldier being patched up during a battle. This is the one that King and Country used as a tribute to his work.

The figures by King and Country are an adaptation from the original image. So the body poses are very close to the original picture. The minor differences are probably only there because the ground on the battlefield was not as flat as the surface of a display shelf. The rest of the figures are almost identical to the image, with a ton of details, from the hole on the pants to the glasses around the neck. It is impossible to not feel compassion for the wounded figure when looking at this, especially when you know it is based on a real person. The only noticeable difference is probably the addition of a peace sign on the back of the helmet of the medic. This is a good idea as McCullin is a pacifist. His work covered a lot of conflicts and many of his pictures are hard to look at, but his goal when photographing the dark side of humanity was to change things. So this peace sign shows a bit more of McCullin, without having to show McCullin himself.

As Don McCullin once said of his work: “ I want [my pictures] to punch you in the face when you look at them.” This set surely does that. It’s a nice tribute to his work and a good reminder that wars are to be avoided as much as possible.