My First Day in Vietnam, Mekong Delta, Vietnam

The most acclaimed British photojournalist of the twentieth century, Don McCullin established his reputation in the 1960s with his stunning combat photographs of the war in Vietnam. At 83 years old, having photographed wars in Vietnam, Cyprus, the Congo, and Biafra, he is a living legend in Great Britain. This acquisition will bring to the Metropolitan among his most lauded works from the start of his more than half-century of picturing making. The brutal story of the Vietnam War are primarily remembered not from the shocking and confusing images broadcast on network television fifty years ago, but those still images by photographers such as Eddie Adams, Larry Burrows, Philip Jones Griffiths, Nick Ut, and McCullin that made their way into magazines and newspapers. These are the images that made history and retain their authority long after the headlines of the conflict have faded from our collective consciousness. Of those that show the effect of war on the survivors, perhaps none is as primal as McCullin’s "Shell Shocked Marine" from 1968, a close up study of an exhausted American soldier staring lost into the camera, gripping his rifle, a painful exemplar of what the medical community now terms "post-traumatic stress syndrome."