Few photographers have stared into the heart of conflict like Sir Don McCullin. For more than two decades, his black-and-white images defined what it meant to document war. Stark, empathetic portraits of soldiers, civilians, and refugees caught in the chaos of Vietnam, Cyprus, Biafra, and Northern Ireland with his unglamorous photographs. They were raw, human, and often unbearable to look at because they demanded that viewers confront the cost of violence.
By the 1980s, McCullin had stepped away from the front lines; the decades of conflict had taken a heavy toll on him. Yet his instinct to bear witness never left him. In 2017, he traveled to Palmyra, the ancient Syrian city once celebrated as a jewel of Roman architecture. Located on the Silk Road, a vast network of trade routes that connected East Asia with the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, Palmyra thrived as a trading hub linking East and West. Its colonnades, grand temples, and arches stood for centuries as symbols of cultural exchange and human ingenuity.
What McCullin found was silence and ruin. In their campaign of terror, ISIS militants had blown up temples, knocked over columns, and scarred the city’s monuments in an attempt to erase a culture.
McCullin’s photographs of Palmyra are unlike his earlier war images, yet they carry the same moral weight. Instead of wounded faces or battlefield horrors, the subjects are shattered stones, desecrated ruins, and silence. In the broken lines of fallen arches and the rubble thrown across the desert floor, McCullin captures another kind of human tragedy: a destruction of memory itself. These are images not of immediate suffering, but of what is lost when history is deliberately erased through violence.
The importance of the Palmyra project lies in its testimony. McCullin once made sure the world could not look away from war’s victims; at Palmyra, he ensures that the erasure of culture cannot be dismissed or forgotten. His images stand as evidence, as memorials, and as warnings—reminders that war destroys not only people, but also the very symbols of our shared humanity and culture.
Today, McCullin’s legacy reaches far beyond photojournalism. He redefined what conflict photography could achieve, elevating it into a moral act as much as an artistic one. His career underscores a lifelong truth: the role of photographers is not simply to record events, but to confront us with them, to insist we see what we might otherwise turn away from.
In many ways, Palmyra mirrors McCullin’s own journey. Both endured devastations: one as an ancient city reduced to rubble, the other as a man witnessing human cruelty over multiple decades. And yet both still stand as testaments to endurance and memory. The broken stones of Palmyra quietly speak of civilizations past, while McCullin’s photographs ensure those quiet voices are not lost to silence and time. In the above video from Times Radio, walk alongside Don McCullin as he describes why he's drawn to Palmyra and his desire to document this once-busy trading hub that blended multiple cultures.
