Acclaimed war photographer, Don McCullin, speaks candidly to Paul Herrmann on the eve of his major exhibition at Imperial War Museum North. Having spent his career either on or close to the front line, McCullin tells Herrmann that it was only when it struck him that ‘the real price of war was civilian’ that he realised the true purpose of war photography: to give a voice to the people in his images, that photography was merely a form of communication.

Read a transcript of our Don McCullin interview.

Read more about the Don McCullin exhibition, and plan your visit to Imperial War Museum North in our guides pages.

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Let’s be honest. Manchester is not known for its architectural planning. It has some spectacular individual buildings. It has some of the finest examples of Industrial Revolution architecture anywhere in the world. Castlefield is one of the most beautiful urban parks in Europe. But master-planned to within an inch of its life it is not – Manchester is instead a chaotic jumble of old and new, stunning and shameful. While Manchester remains one of the top tourist destinations in the UK, you come here for what the city does, not what it looks like.

So to meet a photographer whose portfolio contains one beautiful cityscape after another – well, you’d just assume said snapper worked in New York or Barcelona or Paris. But although Andrew Brooks has photographed cities all over the world, most recently in South Asia, he is beguiled by Manchester. He has spent the majority of his career documenting the city (his Hidden Manchester exhibition at Urbis last year was a show-stopper, uncovering as it did the concealed and forgotten tunnels, towers, courtyards and arches that give Manchester its architectural soul). And his latest documentary project is for Corridor Manchester, the public-private body responsible for the redevelopment of the area in and around Oxford Road – a street that has the dubious honour of being the busiest bus route in Europe. ‘I only work in digital, creating composite images built from many exposures and post-production techniques,’ he says. ‘The end result is a slightly hyper-real shot.’ With a background in both documentary and high-end photography, Brooks straddles both worlds – the Urbis exhibition with its foot in the art world; the Oxford Road job ‘somewhere in the middle, using high-end techniques but with a documentary style.’

With as many as 70 shots being used to make a single image, Brooks admits that he spends a huge amount of time scoping out potential shots, negotiating access to roof-tops and vantage points. His recent Asian travels saw him granted access to some incredible locations – the runway at Hong Kong Airport was just one (and given the recent debate around photography in public places, this access is all the more remarkable). ‘I have a strong idea of what I want to do with any given image before I actually shoot it,’ he says. ‘I want to capture how it felt to be in a place – I don’t just want to take a picture of it. When people look at my work I want them to be able to imagine themselves in it. That’s why I don’t tend to have people in my shots. It’s distracting, it doesn’t leave room for your imaginary self to go there.’

For the Corridor project, Brooks has similarly created a series of atmospheric (and mostly people-free) images that sum up this fascinating part of town. Oxford Road is, for example, home to the largest university campus in Europe (thanks to two universities that sit cheek-by-jowl); one of the biggest hospital complexes in the world, and all the research and bio-tech centres that cluster around it; and the profusion of galleries, libraries and theatres that line its route. Oh yes, and all those bloody buses. ‘I’m trying to pull together something solid so that people can understand the area, an image that they can pin their ideas onto. I want to make pictures that are as close to being there as possible.’

It doesn’t appear that Brooks is going to tire of Manchester anytime soon. ‘People help each other here,’ he says. ‘You don’t get lost; there are cool streets. It’s an interesting city to read as you walk around; there’s a fascinating mix of old wealth and new buildings.’ Click through his photos here and you’ll start to understand why we at Creative Tourist are so passionate about the city Andrew Brooks is proud to call home.

View more of Andrew Brooks’ work here. Find out more about Corridor Manchester, and the proposed redevelopment of the Oxford Road area of Manchester. This includes diverting those pesky buses and installing super fast broadband. Over the next 12 months, 1,000 homes and 500 businesses will be directly connected to new fibre optic cables, which will increase broadband speeds to 100 mbps and create an unparalled open access wifi network.

Main image: Hong Kong Airport courtesy Andrew Brooks

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The Lowry is pulling out all the stops for its tenth birthday, with the first art exhibition of its anniversary year suggesting a strong start. Circus is a new show from acclaimed art photographers Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low, whose previous exhibitions have been shown at Tate Modern, the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery. In Circus, over 30 large-scale images portray various members of an international circus company. Made-up and in full costume, the performers are either shown in a series of static portrait shots or in motion, while performing. And while the latter images are breathtaking, the portrait photographs are perhaps the strongest – and strangest – of the bunch. ‘Circus performers have to be very disciplined and determined,’ said Anderson and Low. ‘But we think that inside they can be quite melancholy. We want to capture this strange mixture of hard work, artistry, happiness and sadness.’

To capture just that, Anderson and Low placed their portrait subjects in the slightly incongruous setting of an amusement park. So we see three impeccably dressed ballerinas astride a rocket ride; the serious, white painted-face of an athletic trampoline performer atop the sort of horse normally found on a carousel; and then the same man again, with his colleagues, posed in front of the dodgems. The images are both unsettling and, occasionally, comic – except that none of the circus troupe are laughing. Because of that, Anderson and Low have created an uncomfortable distance between the subject of the photographs and the viewer; they have cleverly replicated the distance between the pain and discipline endured by performers, and the easy pleasure of circus punters sitting snugly in their ringside seats.

The first major showing of Anderson and Low’s figurative colour series, the exhibition includes another first: the pair’s first ever film installation. Motion is a three-screen video work that focuses on Pasha, an aerial silk performer. Like the circus performers who stare out from the accompanying photographs, Pasha looks both at ease and unreal: the precision and apparent effortlessness of his movements at odds with the reality of what he is doing, suspended in mid-air, using only his body to propel himself through a sequence of incredibly demanding moves. It is an insight into an alien world, or one only usually seen from afar, with greasepaint and lights obscuring the view. It makes for fascinating viewing.

Circus runs at The Lowry until 11 April 2010. Free entry.

Main image: Sergiy Tumbler on Derby Racer Ride © Anderson & Low

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Whoever said it’s hard to be a woman wasn’t being flippant. Sometimes it is. We are defined by what we should be: good mothers, great lovers, and women with meaningful careers. We are told we can have it all – but only, it seems, if we play by the rules. What we look like, how we present ourselves: this, more often than not, is the measure against which our success will be held. ‘The average 16 year-old girl will see thousands of distorted, airbrushed and transformed images of herself and how she’s supposed to be,’ said author Jeanette Winterson recently.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that for the past 100 years or so, female artists have stuck two fingers up at the social status quo by producing images of women that startle, suggest and mock. Among the first were the Surrealists, some of whose work is on show in Angels of Anarchy – artists such as Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun and Lee Miller (the latter once photographed a severed breast, neatly set on a plate with knife and fork, in the offices of Vogue – unsurprisingly, she was thrown out of the building after securing only a few shots).

But in amongst Angels of Anarchy’s strange and surreal artworks are two pieces by the photographer Francesca Woodman. Produced later, during the 1970s, these quiet, black and white images are part of a body of work that question how women’s bodies can both enslave and liberate. Her images invariably show a lone figure (often herself), photographed in a house, the ultimate traditional, domestic setting. But the setting is deeply unsettling: in this semi-derelict home, wallpaper peels off walls, floors are filthy, rooms stripped bare.

In one image, we see Woodman staring at the camera, expressionless. She is naked, her back arched, hair tumbling to the ground, and it’s impossible to tell quite what she’s doing or why. In another, she stands in a corner, naked but for a plastic sheet, like a shop mannequin waiting to be unwrapped. Often, her face is turned away from the camera. Woodman pictures herself disappearing – into and out of the frame, often blurred beyond recognition. Her photographs deliberately confound, and ask more questions than they answer: what is she doing in the house? Is she victim or master? It’s hard not to feel as if Woodman is playing with us, forcing us to consider both her position and our own. In doing so, she becomes much more than the passive muse, waiting for adoration.

And yet in her images we see a woman who is lost. There is tenderness in her portraits, and vulnerability. She is a ghost, one who can beguile or terrify, but ultimately has yet to find a solid place for herself in the world. Perhaps this reads too much into Woodman’s images – the artist committed suicide in 1981, aged just 22 – but perhaps not. ‘Women are still in transition,’ said Winterson, back in Manchester. ‘We don’t know how to see ourselves, we don’t really know how to represent ourselves. It’s not finished by a long way.’

Ninety years on from those early attempts by the female Surrealists to create a new, empowered female visual identity, it seems that women have yet to carve out an image that is entirely of their own making. And until we do, we are lost. Like Woodman, we are just ghosts in a room: looking for freedom but unable to escape.

Angels of Anarchy, Manchester Art Gallery. Until 10 January 2010. £6/£4 entry (under 18s free). Susie Stubbs is the editor of Creative Tourist.

Main image: From Polka Dots (1976), Providence, Rhode Island, Francesca Woodman.

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A new photography exhibition at The Lowry gets up close and personal with some of Britain’s biggest stage stars. Taking its name from the half-hour before curtain up, The Half goes backstage to show thespians including Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett and Jude Law in surprisingly frank poses. ‘The half’ is a private time for an actor; it is the thirty minutes when everyone is cleared out and the actors are left alone to focus on the performance ahead. As a result, the half is rarely captured on film – but it’s something that photographer Simon Annand, working over a period of 25 years, has managed with remarkable results.

‘I try to remain as open as possible to the rhythms of the room, and be aware that actors differ from performance to performance,’ says Annand as he explains how he snapped actors at their most vulnerable. ‘The atmosphere in my photographs is one of honesty and intimacy. These are people who are prepared to be affected by emotion, who are gathering themselves before a performance and quite often the mood is one of melancholy.’

Annand’s portraits range from a young Antony Hopkins, then a little-known actor in the 1980s, to Daniel Radcliffe (AKA Harry Potter) during his more recent West End debut. Annand himself knows his stuff when it comes to the theatre. As a photographer he has worked with pretty much every leading company going: the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal Court and The Old Vic to name a few. He also has a fan-base among the acting fraternity. ‘He is an individualist with an eye for the unusual,’ said Judi Dench of his work for this exhibition. ‘The results speak for themselves.’

The Half: Photographs of Actors by Simon Annand, The Lowry. From 19 September until 3 January 2010. Free.

Main image: The Half: Photographs of Actors by Simon Annand. Alison Steadman

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Manchester-based photographer, Natalie Curtis knows how to pick a subject: her portfolio is full of shots of musicians, actors and models. It’s perhaps no surprise. The Curtis family trade was the music industry and, as a child, the photographer got used to the musicians who regularly dropped by. ‘I learned to be there but not there, to be an onlooker and a confidante,’ she says.

It was a role that Curtis carried on into her professional life as today, despite the chaotic places she often finds herself in, Curtis has an ability to work almost unnoticed by her subjects. Unlike traditional rock photography, then, this quiet documentary style results in startlingly warm and intimate portrait shots – and it was this approach that won her a place on the Best of Manchester shortlist earlier this summer. ‘To me, the photographs are like letters and stories, like true fiction, a mix of document and myth,’ says Curtis. ‘Because they are as much about what you can’t see, I hope that viewers can make them their own.’

Natalie’s work is currently on display at Urbis, as part of the Best of Manchester Awards (until 20 September). Image above: Harry Treadaway (2006).

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The Whitworth, formerly the grand old dame of the Manchester art scene, has shaken off its fusty image – and taken all the art off its walls. A brave move? Yes and no. Considering it is working with the uncompromising performance artist, Marina Abramovic, to curate an equally uncompromising work for Manchester International Festival, stripping the galleries bare is not so much a dramatic step as an essential one. ‘It makes the gallery brand new,’ says its director, Maria Balshaw. This month’s photo story reveals the birth of an all-new Whitworth.

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