A click fix

In 1970 Don McCullin was with a platoon of Cambodian soldiers in the rice fields of Prey Veng when the Khmer Rouge opened fire. McCullin chucked his camera (a Nikon F) on a nearby ridge and hurled himself into the water, his head almost submerged. When he retrieved his camera moments later, it bore the imprint of a bullet from an AK-47. The photographer found this exhilarating, as he explains in his autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. ‘I thought to myself, Boy, you’ve done it again,’ he admits, ‘you’ve managed to get away with it.’ Almost 50 years later this battle-scarred Nikon was a key exhibit in an exhibition of McCullin’s work at Tate Britain.

I’ve long held the belief that objects have a biographical history that can sometimes be read in their appearance. Just as we are unavoidably shaped, marked andis a favourite of mine. It features portraits of stuffed toys that have been snuggled, squeezed and stroked until they have literally been loved to bits. Nixon describes these toys as, ‘repositories of hugs, of fears, of hopes, of tears, of snots and smears’. They are transitional objects that ease the path from childhood to adulthood. The pictures are both celebratory and bittersweet.