Don McCullin

0:08Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading creative people discuss the influences and experiences which have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the photographer Sir Don McCullin. He started out in the late 1950s documenting the working class lives of the North London neighbourhood in which he'd grown up. Employed by the Observer newspaper and later the Sunday Times, McCullen's photographs captured scenes of struggle, despair and violence. Travelling to the front lines of conflict zones in Cyprus, Beirut, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Northern Ireland and elsewhere, McCullen earned a hard-won reputation as one of the greatest war photographers of all time.

0:51In recent years, he's focused his lens on the beauty of the natural world, particularly the landscape around his home in Somerset. His work is held in permanent collections around the world, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the VNA. He was knighted in 2017 for services to photography. John, we are. Oh, hello. How are you? Old. No, you're not. You haven't aged a day. You're 90, aren't you? I am. I mean, that's ridiculous. You look fabulous. That's very kind of you, but I passed myself by date.

1:25Don McCullen, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. Your name is usually paired with the phrase war photographer, but you've said in the past that you don't like that description. You don't like being called a war photographer. Well, it sounds like somebody who works in an abattoir. It's not a very flattering kind of name. I'm just a photographer, very happy with that title. And also, I have a broad range of photographic interests. so to be associated with the most grimmiest kind of cultural aspect of human life war is pretty uncomfortable for me Do you regard yourself as an artist though?

2:03No, absolutely not, that's another title I detest actually I'm a simple man I don't have too many demands on my life but I've stumbled into photography by accident and if it wasn't for photography I wouldn't be the kind of man I am today, really. You were one of the first photographers to have a show at the V &A in the 70s. In 2019, there was a massive show at Tate Modern, a retrospective, and your images are shown in museums and art galleries all around the world. Why resist this word artist? I think it's because of the intensity of myself as a person and my work. I stumbled into photography accidentally.

2:46I failed my trade test to become a photographer in the RAF when I did my national service in Kenya. And I came out with a camera and I pawned it. And my mother got it out of the pawn shop for a fiver. And I started photographing the local people in Finnsbury Park. We're going to come on to that. You were born in North London in 1935. And you've talked before about growing up in poverty. Can you describe in your memory the walk home from school, the walk down your road into your family home? What do you see in that memory? It was a pretty miserable family life I had. My father was dying when I was a child, and I loved my father.

3:25My mother was very stern and quite brutal, and bad language and violence from her drinking. Poverty, actually, it grounded me, really, because I felt ashamed of my life as a child. I felt ashamed of my family, really. I mean, my father I loved because he had a chronic asthma and died at the age of 40. So you would have been... I was 13 years of age. But I think all these combinations of struggles that I had in my life as a child, I was fighting, you know, the poverty. I was fighting the boys in the street. The schoolmasters were the last of the Victorian sadistic schoolmasters who felt they could teach you by, you know, violence.

4:10You can't teach anybody anything using violence as your method. You were evacuated to the West Country during the war. I was sent away to Somerset, where I live now. I stayed there two years. I went back and I was shipped out to Lancashire, an even tougher place where the people were not kind to me. And I didn't have a bath in 18 weeks, staying with that family. They were quite brutal. but I mean all these kind of scars from my background I could only help feeling that they at the end of the day they did me a lot of good when I grew up and I faced up to the political world, the newspaper world I worked in

4:55On This Cultural Life, Don McCullen my guests choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity and your first choice for this programme is your first camera. In the mid-1950s you were called up for national service and you joined the REF and you were posted, I think, to Egypt and Kenya and Cyprus and this is where you were first introduced to photography in a way. What were you doing? What was your role? I was doing really awful, just printing, mapping. We were leaving the Canal Zone, we were leaving Kenya at the end of the day I was constantly making maps and aerial reconnaissance maps and things.

5:34This was during the Mau Mau uprising? That's correct. I would sit every night and chop up three and a half thousand pictures of the jungle. Reconnaissance photos. Hardly creatively inspiring. Brought back by some camera bomber. So what was the first camera and where did you buy it? It was called a Rolly Cord. Somebody said to me in the RAF camp at Eastleigh in Nairobi, if you give one of the pilots 30 quid, they do these milk runs to Aden where it's duty free. and he'll buy you a camera. So I chose the Raleigh cord. It was£30. It was brought back to me in a brand-new leather case, German camera.

6:07It was the poor kind of cousin of the Raleigh Flex, which I couldn't afford. Nevertheless, that got published in The Observer, 1959, I think. Well, it was that photograph that you're talking about that changed your life, depicting a gang of youth standing in the framework of a bombed-out building in Finsbury Park, just yards, I think, from your family home. Absolutely. The photograph is titled The Governors. So who were the governors? Well, they felt that they were the people who ruled the area. They don't look that tough, to be honest, I must say. They're in their kind of sandy suits. One of the boys sitting down was an armed robber eventually.

6:46This guy here? Yes. I've got the photograph here in front of us. Yes, I see. That, by the way, building was at the end of my street in Fontail Road. And they said, why didn't you get that camera? And I went up the house and got the camera, and I said, jump up there. And everybody says how nice the composition is. And there was a gap for everybody, as you can see. Well, it is a beautiful photograph in many ways. The symmetrical structure, the youths, the gang, standing on the framework of the building, they're almost like crows on a telephone line, aren't they? You know what, the most important aspect of it, if you are looking at it in a deeper way, is the fact that each individual one of them is wearing a suit.

7:27And that's their Sunday best because they were off to the cinema, off to dates or something. That's right. There was a cinema just across the road. They would always go to the cinema without trying to pay by breaking into the exit doors at the back. So these were bad boys. I mean, this was a seriously violent gang then, wasn't it, at the time? Well, they were bad, but they weren't, that particular bunch, weren't particularly good, you might say, with their fists. We all grew up in that part of having to fight each other. that scarred my life. I still have dreams of these fights and boys, and I didn't want to be part of that.

8:04I actually didn't want to be incarcerated in a prison, as most of them eventually wound up doing. Dan, it really is extraordinary, because I know in the past you've talked about being haunted in a way, having dreams of war, but you're saying that even these boys that you knew probably at primary school, that you grew up with, that you feared in a way, still are there in your memories and your fears. Well, I fought a few and lost a few battles among a few. Let's put it like that. But, I mean, violence and bigotry is what those people dined out on. This is really interesting. This is the back story of this photograph.

8:36It's the urban destruction of the war that we can see, the sort of almost implicit gang violence of the governors. This photograph set the recurring theme for your whole career, really, which has been violence and brutality. were you, I mean you talk about the fear of these were you attracted to violence do you think as a young man? Not at all I was attracted to escape it the truth is violence was the name of the game when I grew up in North London and some of the actual boys in that photograph were later involved in a gang war with another bunch of people from Islington itself and they came down to attack these boys and a policeman tried to intervene and was murdered was stabbed by one of the other boys So my whole life has been established on this note of the policeman died, the man who stabbed him was hung in Pentafilk prison.

9:30So you're quite right. I'm obviously directing. My life is taking me towards the ultimate violence of war. But the irony is that this photograph began your career because to illustrate this story of this policeman having been stabbed and then the young man being hanged in Pentafilk, They used this photograph in the Observer newspaper. So that was the beginning of your career. Did all the commissions after that follow fairly quickly? No, they didn't really. I mean, the Observer gave me 50 pounds, which was like a king's ransom. It was an amazing amount of money for me to have in my life. And then the idea of having my name under a bunch of pictures in the Observer newspaper in 1959 elevated my imagination.

10:13I mean, you know, when you came from, we were humbled by our poverty as children, as people, and degraded by it. And, you know, I left school at the age of 15 with no education, not a single sign of education. But I had a very reoccurring kind of imaginative mind. I knew I wasn't going to settle for what I was given. And once this picture was published and it had my name, and by the way, it wasn't my name. it was my father's name who died. The reward for me and my life is knowing I've made my father's name mean something. When you first started taking those photographs, whether it was your neighbours in the street or travelling around England, there was so much drama and poetry in those images.

10:59How did you know what to do at that time? Well, naturally, when I got my pictures published in The Observer of the gang, I started trying to learn about photography because I knew nothing about photography. and then I started picking out people who I thought were useful to me. So I came across a man called Alfred Stiglitz, who was a German-Jewish New Yorker. And then there was another man called Edward Steichen, who came from Europe. So I'd picked on two of the greatest men. And what about some of the greats at the time when you started people like Cartier-Bresson or Brassai, La Tigue, some of those great French photographers?

11:37Were you aware of them? I eventually got round to them And I met a very sweet man called Bill Brandt who fled Germany in the early 30s, having had consumption and came and never went back to Germany and never spoke German again. And he photographed the English miners in the north of England. Photographers have always been attracted by the people in the north of England who were the backbone of our society, who were even poorer than the people I grew up with in Finster Park. Yes, Brandt did that and so did Robert Frank, the American photographer. So you're looking at these people who were established already possibly as the great.

12:10Yeah, historical people, yeah. But you must have had, you must acknowledge now that you had some incredible natural talent for image making. They or me? No, you. Oh, well, I don't know if we know, we feel maybe there's talent in us, but we mustn't boast about it. We have to discover it and we have to mine it ourselves. But I had to learn about, because I left school with no education, I didn't have much of grey matter up here. but I've acquired it over the years, and without being bombastic about it, I've tried to be modest, because if you open your mouth too big, somebody will put a cricket bat in it.

12:45But the history of photography is the most important thing to me. I do my own printing because I can keep control of the whole thing. And I waste a lot of paper, I know, but when I'm printing in the darkroom, my hand reaches out for paper and I expect it to be there, and I'm just like a kind of glutton of a schoolboy with sweets. I don't care until the last one's gone and then I realise the last one's gone and there's no more paper and I've got to stop printing. And then sometimes I finish when it's dawn and my hands are numb with the freezing cold water that you have to keep using. You have always worked in the darkroom in a very traditional way.

13:27The darkroom is a very deciding kind of moment in my life. I'm alone there. I'm in charge of these people's images, and I can go dark and dark. If violence is the recurring theme, then darkness is surely the recurring tone, even before you started taking photographs of war. A lot of these photographs that we see of England, of Finsbury Park, around the streets of your home, they're very, very dark. Why do you print so dark? I can only assume it's the darkness within me, and I always manage to feel that if I print my pictures dark, Like, nobody's going to walk past one of my pictures and not take a second look, if not hold him for a couple of minutes or seconds longer.

14:08What's extraordinary, looking through this book, which is one of many that you've published, documenting the photographs from throughout your whole career, is many of the early photographs that follow this one of the governors are of poverty in Britain. The streets of North London, there are unemployed men scavenging for coal in Sunderland, the squalid back rooms of homes in the north of England. actually. I think it's in my blood. I care about other people's lives. I feel guilty that I live in a very nice house in Somerset. But do you think you set out to take those photographs of England initially with a sense of social purpose or even a moral purpose?

14:46Yeah, I have two moral aspects of life. One is the moral aspect of feeling guilty about, A, surviving many wars I've been to and I lost many, many friends and journalist friends and the other moral thing is, is feeling that I've helped myself to other people's lives misery. I photograph misery. I photograph murder. I photograph death of children in starvation in the Bialyst War. I'm covered in a kind of guilty cloak that makes me feel, you know, I haven't got it all my own way. Whatever I own, I feel it doesn't really belong to me. For all the honors I've received, which are also uncomfortable.

15:28I'm a very complex, uncomfortable man, really. But do you not take any quiet, I was going to say pride, but that's probably not the right word, or satisfaction knowing that you have illustrated some of the awful things that go on in the world? Not a bit. I couldn't possibly feel good about any of the things I've done in wars. The only time I enjoy myself is when I photograph the English landscape in Somerset around the house where I live. I mean, I can't imagine why I haven't been heavily criticised in the past for the things I've done. After all, photography isn't just about photography. It's about stealing other people's images, other people's tragedies and lives.

16:08You don't have the God-given right to just walk around helping yourself to other people's problems. Stealing is a really interesting word. Stealing? You say you're stealing people's images. I have. What I was doing was never given permission to do. I went around helping myself. I would walk the streets in East London and photograph homeless people. Strange enough, when I did that, I think it was one of the best essays I ever did in my photographic life. Going to war never benefited anybody, really. Even the people who believe in anti-war, they're already converted. What was I doing? What was I trying to prove?

16:47But what did you think at the time? You're saying now, retrospectively, you have this sense of guilt and also you feel you were stealing people's images. But did you feel that at the time? Yeah. I mean, I've always tried to deal with honesty. When I press that button, I know I'm telling the truth because I'm in charge of my actions. And I've stood in front of people who are being executed and crying and looking at me and thinking I can save them. and there's no way and yet I've only did that once in Beirut when I saw the phalange murdering hundreds of Palestinian males even boys of 14. I always felt as though I was complicit in being part of that massacre that day.

17:33I was with them the people who decided who would live and die. They released all the baby women and children and murdered all the men. They allowed only the over 60-year-olds to leave. But arguably you were bearing witness if you hadn't taken those photographs and had that sense of that complicity in a way, then we possibly wouldn't have seen the horrors that were taking place in Beirut then. I've got you cornered here because, you know, I did that in 1976. A lot was happening in Gaza in the last couple of years. I stopped nothing. My work could never be attributed to helping anything or anyone.

18:09That's why I feel so bloody uncomfortable.

18:23Your next choice for this cultural life, Don McCullen, is Cyprus, 1964, when conflict broke out between the Greek and Turkish communities. And, as you say in the notes that you've sent us, this was my first taste of conflict. Away from the city in the brown, parched countryside of Cyprus, the full horror and suffering of intercommunal hatred can be seen in the tiny village communities. Turkish Cypriots battle for the heights of St Ilarion, which dominate the Kairinia Road. To do so, they use guerrilla techniques. There are some extraordinary, almost cinematic images from this time. I've just opened the book to a page in which we see a Turkish gunman in a suit and balaclava with a shotgun.

19:09And I think here on the next page, this is amazing, It's a man in a trench coat running from, I think it's the side of a cinema, again, holding a shotgun. What's striking about the picture is, almost like a Hollywood still, the man is extremely well-dressed. It almost takes away the importance of the picture because it looks like a film kind of situation. Especially with the shadow of the gunman. So you're standing on a street in which bullets are flying at this moment for the first time in your life. Was it exciting? The hair on the back of my head was standing up, really. I knew at the time, I thought, you're a lucky devil.

19:44All the press that's not here, you've got it all to yourself. I mean, do you know, I think it's fate in a way that has governed my life. I've been at the right place at the right time or the wrong time. But that particular day, I was just running all over the place. Then I went to other villages where there was terrible things happening. in the following pages of this book there are some appalling images of the civilian casualties dead in this case in their own homes this is your first experience of seeing this kind of slaughter, how did you react emotionally? Well because I came from Tuffle, Trinsbury Park there were two sides to my nature, one was I'm tough enough to handle anything and the other side was I was suffering from I wasn't really a photographer, I kind of stepped into this new role and I was thinking all the time about the pictures, the editor back home as one does when you're in the media world, you're split down the middle and then there are other factors involved like do you get your exposures right, which is important in my craft, you know, I was worried about the exposures, I was also worried about people attacking me Well I was going to say because what's happening in this image where there are two men Two brothers.

20:59They're brothers lying literally in the pools of their own blood. But they were murdered by the Greek irregulars and then the woman holding the towel as looking at her new husband in the foreground who she married a week ago and all their wedding presents in another room had been smashed by the men who murdered those two brothers. Their father was in another room dead. That's how things went on. But you talked about the idea of theft. In this moment, had you asked any permission to take this photograph? I did, I knocked on the door, there was no answer so I gently let myself in that room and the first thing I was met with was the stench of warm blood and I kept saying hello, hello so I was seeking permission within a few minutes of being in that room, that door opened and these people came in and I thought, my God, you're going to get it now they're going to be so angry, you're trespassing over the murder of their family but they weren't, they didn't I actually was moving around that house almost like a ghost.

22:00I was tiptoeing gently and respectfully not treading on anything that might be like blood or anything like that. So I was testing myself that day in more ways than one. From here, Cyprus, 1964, for the next at least two decades or more, it was almost back to back war for you. The Congo, Vietnam, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Beirut. What was driving you on from war to war? Was there a sense of moral obligation, the more you saw? I like the idea of my name being under the Sunday papers pictures. It was a very conceited thing to say. Also, I felt that if I did a good job here, another door would open there for me.

22:44There was a very famous photographer called Robert Cuppa who died in Indochina. he stepped off of the trail to have a pee and stepped on a landmine and went up in the air and I thought hang on there's a vacancy here I want to be the next Robert Capper it's a very silly thing to say I know this and I eventually met Robert Capper's brother Cornel he kind of encouraged me in a way to carry on doing this work. So it wasn't just about morality it was about ego as well Absolutely, you know you couldn't have hit the nail better on the head Ferret Square. It was a bit of this, a bit of that, you know.

23:21But what I did, I had my own philosophy of the way I worked. I worked in a very caring way. Respectful then? Yeah. Respectful of the plight of people? Respectful knowing I'm on thin ice. The Battle of Hue in 1968 was one of the deadliest during the Vietnam War. In the present flare-up of intense fighting in South Vietnam, one of the cities most badly hit and destroyed was the ancient imperial city of Hue, up near the demilitarised zone with the north. Cost in civilian suffering has been terrible. To win back control in Hue, the Americans and South Vietnamese were destroying what they had claimed to protect.

24:08Over 200 American soldiers killed, thousands of Vietnamese were killed during this battle, which I think took place over several weeks. How did you survive it? Well, I spent two weeks there with the American Marines. And, you know, you're never one of them in the first place. I had accreditation which gave me the simulated rank of major. And it always makes me laugh because I came out of the Air Force with the lowest rank that I went in with. But it allowed you to chuck other people off of aeroplanes that rank if you wanted to get on for emergency. And then I started photographing. and the officer I met said this is a 24-hour operation.

24:47This was to capture the citadel which sat on the edge of the Perfume River in the city of Hue. The ancient capital, wasn't it, of Vietnam? It was very beautiful and oriental-looking and by the time they left, there wasn't a stone standing. They flattened it, the Americans. I think the Vietnamese had rebuilt it because I went back but it was one of those gung-ho battles and these American marines, there were snipers in a way that were just picking them off. And I couldn't understand how I exposed myself standing and photographing and doing things. The sniper must have seen me. And he must have said, well, this man's not carrying a weapon.

25:26I'll get somebody else. That's only my own thinking. So I spent 12 days with those people, living next to bodies. And then one day I photographed a man. It looked like the crucifixion of Christ. he was against the war with his arms and being held by two soldiers. I thought, my God, this is the crucifixion of Christ. And I'm not a very religious man, I can assure you. And I shouted, bring him over. And they came towards me and they fell with him. And then I thought, oh God, they've got to blame me. And then I picked him up and carried him away from the battle. I thought, I owe him this. I've just helped myself to his pain.

26:07Was he dying? He didn't die. he eventually went to Guam to hospitalisation came back to Vietnam and six months later took another bullet through his lungs and still managed to survive but he wrote his mother a letter about this strange Englishman who carried him away from the battle I have a copy of that letter at home I felt once in my life I had to do something to give back for a change instead of helping myself that's extraordinary so he wrote to his mother from the front line yes okay he said he'd been hospitalized yes did you ever meet him later did he survive but a friend of mine a very distinguished man called anthony lloyd who works for the times newspaper he went to america and found this man it was there was another man the the actual picture that's staring you now this other man who had a mental breakdown this is the very famous image of the this soldier with a shell-shocked thousand-yard stare.

27:05It slightly annoys me, that picture, because it didn't really tell you the true story of that battle of way. You know, those Americans lost about 40 men in the Delta company I was with on the wall, and we were getting most of the casualties. Just to talk about this shell-shocked US Marine. He's alive today. Is he? Alive and unwilling to talk to us. Really? So you haven't met him since? No, he's around, but his sister said he would have nothing to do with you. But throughout this whole battle over the two weeks that you were there, you were unscathed. It's astonishing that you did survive. But then later in Cambodia, a few years later, you were hit by shrapnel.