Critical Evaluation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words - 1

Critical Evaluation - Essay Example McCullin has always depicted the unemployed, the impoverished and the downtrodden. NGC director and CEO Marc Mayer reported to have said, "McCullins photographs belong in an art gallery because they consistently bring clarity and compositional grace to their compelling subject matter. These pictures are both hard to look at and hard not to" (Mallet para 2). However, his recent encounter of Syria has not been displayed in the gallery, as Sobey Curatorial Assistant Katherine Stauble writes, "Likely (these images) were not meant to hang on a gallery wall, but rather, to communicate information, to reveal truths and to mobilize action. Now that McCullin has escaped the battlefield and for the past twenty years has been focusing his lens on landscape and still life, one might expect the artist moniker to sit more comfortably with him" (para 5). According to McCullin, "Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures" (para 2). This is what has been the most predominant feature of McCullins photography as shown in Figure. 1. There has been embedded in his pictures "the feelings of people" rather than focusing on the other artistic values (figure 1). He, through his images, has tried to get the sympathetic feelings for the affected people. By capturing a childs picture, he is making use of emotions and feelings of people to get attention. As Susan Sontag writes in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), that sufferings and emotions sell more than any other factors (Sontag). The most effective and credible advantage of McCullins work (as shown in Figure. 2) would be his unbiased reporting. He not only showed images of the public dying and their sorrows, but he also showed the sorrows of the free Syrian army (Figure 2). "Im just a carrier pigeon that brings the message back home" (para 18), says McCullin. Thus, effectively,