The past 60 years after WWII on this little island Germany we have seen an unprecedented time of peace and growing wealth: The West seems to have won even the cold war and history seemed to amount to a spiral into an utopia of peace and abundance – from practically every other point in the world, the second half of the century has been a time of terror, despotism and decline and the war has never stopped. Don McCullin has photographed many of the battles of the 20th century and he has seen the unspeakable horrors that wars inflict.

There is a pivotal situation not only in McCullins life, but in the history of media, which explains how photography has changed since the early eighties: On the 13th February of 1981, Rupert Murdoch acquired the Times and the Sunday Times, where McCullin has been working at that time and had published most of his photo-stories about the war for almost 18 years, very shortly after, he left the Times. When he wanted to cover the Falkland wars, he was declined to board the ship taking off to Falkland by the British Government.  If you open up a magazine today, you won’t find images of the wars that are currently ravaging the planet: There are almost no documentations on the atrocities of the war in Iraq, rarely any pictures of Somalia, you could get the idea that no one ever died in the Ukraine – and Rupert Murdoch obviously argumented correctly, when he said that no one wants to see these kind of pictures: Not the people financing newspapers and TV with their ad-money, not the people who watch TV. This has obviously changed from the 70ies, when pictures of war were so common as war itself was: Now, the grip of nations in war who want to control the images are tight: Together with a media in turmoil of greed and cost-cutting and technological change this has formed an absurd climate. War itself is still common, images of war are not. When in 2014, Christoph Bangert had released his book “War Porn”, pages were sealed to prevent viewers from accidentally glimpsing the horror. If we go to war – and currently, all western countries do – we owe it to ourselves and the people we are killing, to do it with our eyes wide open.

The documentary is currently showing on Netflix, it is hard to sit through it without breaking down in tears, but we need to keep our eyes wide open and honor the people that remind us of the horrors, that nobody wants to see anymore.