Don McCullin was born in 1935 in a poor section of northern London, UK. After serving as an aerial photographer for the RAF, from 1964 to 1984 he covered battlefields in Cyprus, the Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, El Salvador, and the Middle East, becoming one of history's greatest war photographers. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including his acclaimed autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour (1990), and 2001's retrospective Don McCullin (both by Jonathan Cape). The winner of numerous awards, including two Premier Awards from the World Press Photo, in 1992 he became the only photojournalist to be made Commander of the British Empire (CBE).
In recent years, in addition to his landscape work in Britain and India, he has focused primarily on the African continent, documenting the AIDS crisis in South Africa, Botswana and Zambia, and producing a book on the “lost tribes” of Ethiopia, Don McCullin in Africa (Jonathan Cape 2005). He was awarded the 2006 Cornell Capa Award by the International Center for Photography in New York for his lifetime contribution to photography. He has been associated with Contact Press Images since 1995. He is based in Somerset, England.