Don McCullin: Vietnam
Vietnam, forthcoming from GOST Books in October 2026, is the first book devoted entirely to Don McCullin’s photographs of the Vietnam War. Conceived as a retrospective of his years covering the conflict, the volume brings together work made between 1965 and 1972 and revisits one of the defining chapters of his career.
The book is structured around three periods, 1965 to 1967, 1968 and 1972, reflecting McCullin’s separate journeys to Vietnam. The photographs have been drawn from an extensive re-examination of his archive, including around thirty rolls of film from each trip. Alongside some of his best known images are many photographs that remained in the shadow of the pictures that came to define his coverage of the war.
Around one hundred black and white photographs and more than twenty colour images are included, with almost half appearing in print or exhibition for the first time. They move between the immediacy of combat and quieter scenes of daily life caught within it. American Marines, wounded civilians, destroyed buildings and abandoned machinery appear alongside moments in which ordinary existence persists against the surrounding violence.
Edited in close collaboration with McCullin and GOST Books director Stuart Smith, Vietnam also brings together contact sheets, personal notes, identification cards, his helmet and boots, pages from the celebrated 1968 Sunday Times feature, and the backs of prints bearing editorial markings and instructions. These materials reveal not only what McCullin witnessed, but also how the photographs travelled from the battlefield into newspapers and public consciousness.
A significant part of the book is formed by new captions recorded during conversations between McCullin and Smith in 2026. For the first time, McCullin recounts many of his experiences in Vietnam at length, returning to memories of fear, violence, loss and the psychological consequences of witnessing war so closely.
His coverage of the Tet Offensive in Hue in 1968 remains central to this story. McCullin spent eleven days inside the Citadel as US Marines fought North Vietnamese forces in some of the most intense urban combat of the war. He had already photographed conflicts in Cyprus, Congo and Israel, but later described Hue as unlike anything he had previously experienced.
Looking back across six decades, the photographs resist any sense of heroism or spectacle. They are instead an account of what war does to people, to landscapes and to those who witness it. McCullin has described Vietnam as his final book, giving the volume the character of both an historical document and a personal reckoning with a subject that has remained with him throughout his life.
About the Author
Don McCullin is a British photographer whose work has shaped the visual history of war, poverty and social inequality for more than six decades. Born in London in 1935, he began photographing in the late 1950s and went on to cover some of the major conflicts of the twentieth century, including wars in Cyprus, Congo, Vietnam, Biafra, Cambodia and the Middle East.
During his long association with The Sunday Times Magazine, McCullin became known for photographs that combined direct reportage with an intense awareness of the human consequences of conflict. Beyond war photography, he has documented poverty and homelessness in Britain, as well as landscapes, still lifes and archaeological sites.
His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major museum collections. In 2017 he was knighted for services to photography, and in 2019 Tate Britain presented a major retrospective of his career.
