Dialectics of Division: Don McCullin’s photographs of the Berlin Wall under construction, 1961

Refereed/peer reviewed research conference paper. This paper offers a reading of Don McCullin’s relatively little-known photographs of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, considering them primarily in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s writing on ‘the Dialectics of Inside and Outside’ in The Poetics of Space, 1958. Don McCullin witnessed the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 at the age of 25, calling it at the time ‘the biggest story in the world’. As well as the historic focal-points of Checkpoint Charlie and Friedrichstrasse, much of his attention is directed at ordinary East- and West-Berliners looking, mainly at one another, across the divide that is forming between them.