I recently visited the exhibition of the work on Don McCullin and saw this image in which McCullin uses the technique of focussing through foreground structures to the distance. This image was taken while McCullin was in Berlin at the time of the building of the Berlin Wall.
While the notes for this exercise suggest that it is usually preferable to focus in the foreground, what McCullin has achieved here is to show a scene in East Berlin of “normal” life, but the blurred image of the wire and barrier remind us that as the Wall was built so this was now cut off from our view point.
Andrew Procter 