Photography, Humanity, Indecency: In Conversation with Sir Don McCullin

The war children play in the skeleton frames of bombed-out cities. Running through broken streets, weaving their way through a maze of tottering buildings. So it is for the children of Kyiv, Aleppo, and Gaza, and so it was for the young Sir Don McCullin:
‘I was surrounded by bombsites as a child, they became my playground. When the war ended, I was ten.’

But for McCullin, the detritus of war was only part of it. He readily admits to being fascinated by the storm itself:
‘Me and the boys, we’d make homemade weapons and take a tuppenny bus ride to Hampstead Heath and re-enact jungle battles. Little did I know I would end up covering so much conflict.’

McCullin grew up an undiagnosed dyslexic – common among artists, who tend to express themselves better in images than words – in a home he describes as a ‘damp two-bedroom dump’. There were no books, and the threat of violence was constant. He took terrible beatings from sadistic Dickensian schoolmasters who dismissed him as a hopeless failure.
‘I think my interest in human suffering comes from the time I grew up in. It was a life of deprivation, of people not having what they needed,’ he says.

He took refuge in the images he discovered in the pages of Everybody’s Magazine and Picture Post on painful trips to the barbers:
‘Children were a bloody nuisance and they really ran those clippers up the back of your head without any consideration.’

But...

‘They had some great photographers in those magazines and that’s where my sense of pictures comes from... this environment gave me my very best start because when I got to the places where other people’s lives were the same as my own, I was prepared, I knew the smell of poverty, I knew violence and fear of violence.’

As a teenager, he hung out with a group of schoolmates, the notorious Finsbury Park Gang, whose tendency towards intimidation and acts of casual violence slowly descended into something darker.
‘Murder, they committed murder, they committed armed robbery, housebreaking was a regular conversation,’ he says.
‘I had to get away from those people, otherwise I would have wound up in prison... and photography – which I believe to this day chose me – gave me my chance.’

With the help of his mother, he retrieved his camera from the pawnshop – where he had traded it for cash to buy a 500cc Norton Commando motorbike – and made The Guvnors, Finsbury Park. He took the pictures to The Observer, who asked him to do more:
‘And so, my love affair with photography began.’

Largely self-taught, McCullin readily acknowledges a debt to such luminaries as Bill Brandt, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. He’s a great technician who will often work long hours in the darkroom until the image, complete with his trademark tones – deep blacks and glistening greys – is just right. As he modestly puts it:
‘I'm a kind of devoted, struggling darkroom technician. I have no interest in the technical side of photography. I use a camera the way I use a toothbrush. All I'm interested in is the visual outcome. And I'm lucky enough to have these hungry eyes always searching out beauty and composition. When I have the chance to photograph, bang, it comes to me immediately... automatically. Using black-and-white photography as a very powerful medium, coupled with the fact I develop my own work, gave me what I needed. ... You can't imagine the worry I put myself through. ... I go in my darkroom and I won't leave until I've got the essence of the very best print I can produce. ... My aim is always to hit you with one of my photographs, you can’t just walk by without paying attention.’

McCullin’s language is the language of art. His prints have a harmony and balance that many have compared favourably to the work of Ansel Adams, and his timing, even under the most appalling pressure, is spot on.

There is a well-known image of a protester in London during the Cuban Missile Crisis, sitting, placard raised against a wall of policemen, that nicely illustrates this exquisite timing:
‘It was so obvious you didn't have to worry about composition. You had the police, you had the man, you pressed the button. ... Photography is one of the quickest things in the world. You're dealing in a twenty-fifth of a second or a fiftieth of a second, or a 125th or a 250th. So, you are up against time. ... You have to do it. In the moment.’

To be able to do this while witnessing man’s inhumanity towards man is McCullin’s great skill. Tales of his calmness under fire are legion. His first assignment for The Observer was to cover the civil war in Cyprus in 1964.
‘All the journalists had been taken up in a military helicopter. I instead got in a car and drove to Limassol and accidentally drove into an active warzone. I was immediately arrested by the Turkish police for my safety. They transported me back to spend a night in the cells. When I woke up, a bullet hit one of the bars, and I thought, “You’re in business” and then I set about photographing all types of mayhem. I was so overwhelmed by what I was seeing I couldn’t relax, and this was sort of my baptism of war. I knew this was for me. I wanted to inherit the Robert Capa crown – there was conceit and arrogance in me then.’

Since that epiphany, McCullin has not dodged just a bullet on our behalf, he has dodged a hail of the things as well as sundry other ordnance. Once, in Cambodia, badly wounded and flung on a truck among the dead and dying, he took his mind off the pain and fear by worrying about his exposures.
‘I didn’t want to... be posthumously mocked by people saying, “He got killed, but his pictures were underexposed.”’

On another occasion in Vietnam, a bullet grazed his helmet. He later recalled how he looked at it with shock and disbelief, realising how close he had come to dying.
‘It was as if someone was looking out for me, as if I had been given a second chance... but how could I take that chance when so many others didn’t? That’s something that stays with me.’

McCullin has had more second chances than most:
‘In Vietnam, there was a man standing beside me when a grenade dropped between us. We both looked at it. I dived into a depression in the ground. He hesitated – a split second – and in that moment, it blew the back of his head off. I've got a picture of him dying with a medic attending him. Two days later, that medic was killed in front of me by a sniper. At points like that, you begin to ask yourself, “What the hell has this got to do with photography?” You're in a deep humanitarian survival crisis. Photography almost seems like a by-product, a luxury you can't afford.’

When McCullin started out, there was an unwritten rule among editors not to feature pictures of the dead and dying. That changed dramatically in the early 1960s when first Paris Match and then The Sunday Times started sending photojournalists to the front line and disaster zones. McCullin recalls:
‘In the battlefield, I would create images and think, “They’ve got to use this on the cover.”’

Yet, on more sombre reflection, he firmly believes media attention distorts the reality of war.

‘They want to dress it up, make it look noble. But war is ugly and vile. It always has been. ... I’m still haunted by the morality of what I did because you don’t have the blessing of the people suffering in your pictures, least of all men being executed in front of you – so I’ve always carried this moral lashing and scourged myself because as a photographer you don’t have the right to go out and help yourself, but we did just that.’

He will often allude to a sense of destiny:
‘I was chosen in a way or given this chance to perpetuate my kind of time. And I think I've done that. I paid back whoever decided I was going to be a photographer.’

Despite that spiritual outlook, his relationship with religion is complicated:
‘In Vietnam, when things were going very badly, a pastor came up to me and said, “Can I offer you a blessing?” I declined as I thought this would result in me being wiped out the following day.’

If McCullin was chosen, then his mission was like Conrad’s Kurtz: to gaze deeply into the ultimate horror of warfare. Yet rather than parrot Kurtz’s ‘the horror, the horror’, McCullin calmly dredges eloquence from the depths of hell:
‘The appalling things I used to photograph... we had this kind of carte blanche attitude because we had a camera that meant we could take a picture of anyone or anything at any time.’

That said, for McCullin there were limits:
‘I had to set personal, moral boundaries because I used to see a lot of television organisations who were too big for their boots. ... In Sabra and Shatila mental hospital [in Lebanon in 1982], where they were being shelled from offshore boats, the press corps came rushing in, treading on children, pushing, shouting, saying, “This is prime time USA,” and they thought they had the moral right to just trash the place, and that they had some kind of priority over the suffering.’

McCullin confesses he worked best alone, dictating his own terms. Nonetheless:
‘I always felt as if I was on a tightrope and that I’d be undone by a single mistake.’

Then one day in Beirut, he photographed a woman who had seen her block of flats collapse.
‘She saw me take the photograph and she came and she punched me. Really, really severely, I took a really good hiding that day, which I thought looking back I deserved.’

He had briefly lost sight of one of his own great lessons, which is that war and catastrophe are riven with millions of individual tragedies. It is not just about timing and, in his terms, being blessed with a good eye. Since he began, there has been something stirring in his soul, a feeling for the individual that has made him one of photography’s great portraitists.
‘I look at those early portraits from the homeless series I made in Spitalfields and always come back to a particular image I call Neptune. His eyes are looking intensely at me, and I remember asking myself, “Why is this man looking at me?” He was an extraordinarily beautiful man... like the sea god Neptune. I also have a picture of him lying down by a fire. He has a woman’s hat on, and he’d been daubed by the Hare Krishna who had brought him soup the night before. There was a clear tragedy to his situation. I thought to myself, “I can walk away from these people, get in a bath, have a meal, sleep in a warm bed, whereas they can’t.” I think that Sunday Times piece on homelessness is one of the best pieces of photojournalism I’ve ever done.’

There have been many times when he might have walked away,
‘But my eyes are always perceptive, they're always ahead of me.’

They were ahead of him in Vietnam in 1968. Nothing is still in war. Everything in the Battle of Hué was chaos, flux, fear, and movement. And then. Sitting alone statue-still was a man, a US Marine.
‘If you’re trained as a US Marine, you're not supposed to show your personal feelings. I dropped on my knees in front of him as if he was some form of icon. It was almost a religious moment. I was kneeling in front of him with my camera. He was oblivious, completely broken. There he was with his thousand-yard stare, looking right through me.’

There’s a circularity to McCullin’s long journey through photography. From his beginnings amidst the bombsites of war-torn London to what he describes as ‘the sinister magic’ of the 2,000-year-old Roman ruins he has been photographing on his recent visits to Palmyra in Syria and elsewhere. Yet even as he reflects upon this pattern, a troubling thought occurs.
‘I’ve played a strange game. I inherited this responsibility... but at the same time it becomes another journey, another situation, another unbearable guilt trip for me that I can't stop children being killed. All I am is a photographer, yet I think to myself, “You still have the blood on your hands of those people when you press that button on that camera.” And I find that unbearable. It’s got nothing to do with photography; it is to do with the sheer decency of humanity that has gone unrecognised. So I’m trapped in a kind of gluey situation. Photography, humanity, indecency’