Don McCullin<\/a>. Over his seven-decade career covering wars, famines and disasters McCullin has been captured, and escaped snipers, mortar fire and more. How does it feel to be a survivor? \u201cUncomfortable,\u201d he says. No wonder he finds solace in the beautiful still lifes he creates in his shed, or in the images he composes in the countryside around his Somerset home.<\/p>\nMcCullin is proud of escaping the extreme poverty he was born into, and the interesting and adventurous life he has lived, but he says the accolades \u2013 including a knighthood in 2017 \u2013 make him uneasy. \u201cI feel as if I\u2019ve been over-rewarded, and I definitely feel uncomfortable about that, because it\u2019s been at the expense of other people\u2019s lives.\u201d But he has been the witness to atrocity, I point out, and that\u2019s important. \u201cYes,\u201d he says, uncertainly, \u201cbut, at the end of the day, it\u2019s done absolutely no good at all. Look at Ukraine. Look at Gaza. I haven\u2019t changed a solitary thing. I mean it. I feel as if I\u2019ve been riding on other people\u2019s pain over the last 60 years, and their pain hasn\u2019t helped prevent this kind of tragedy. We\u2019ve learned nothing.\u201d It makes him despair.<\/p>\n
The most harrowing photographs are McCullin\u2019s best-known, but his career, which began 67 years ago, spans many genres, including beautiful landscapes, portraits and photographs of ancient ruins and antiquities. On a recent late autumn day, we sat at his table, surrounded by laden bookshelves, in a lovely room overlooking land on which he has planted many trees, and he talked me through his life in pictures.<\/p>\n
Guvnors, Finsbury Park gang, 1958<\/p>\n
McCullin grew up in north London, in a damp two-room basement in a tenement building. His father suffered chronic asthma and died when McCullin was 14. He left school soon afterwards. National service with the RAF followed, and that was where he discovered photography. This photograph, of a gang of young men McCullin grew up with, was published in the Observer when he was 23 and had been working at a London animation studio. It started his career.<\/p>\n
In Finsbury Park, people\u2019s doors were always open. My mother was never home because she worked on the railway. We had gaslight, and there were lots of horses around, delivering coal or for the brewery. Sometimes, they\u2019d let you sit on the back of one. I come from another culture.<\/p>\n
During the war, I was evacuated three times, and each time I\u2019d come back to a London that was more derelict. We would climb these bombed buildings. It was like climbing inside cathedrals, the carcasses of these buildings, and we\u2019d sit at the top eating chips stuffed into a roll. In a way, I had a real childhood. Sometimes, we would get the train up to Cockfosters, run across the live rails into the countryside and capture grass snakes and birds\u2019 eggs. Children don\u2019t have a life like that today.<\/p>\n
I used to get battered by bullies. I\u2019d win the odd fight, but I would lose a lot of others. These boys in the photograph, all they talked about was violence, robbery, housebreaking. One of them was an armed robber who had been in prison.<\/p>\n
I was surrounded by violence and bigotry and it was getting to me. These people hadn\u2019t travelled like me. I\u2019d been to Sudan, Egypt and Cyprus with the RAF, and started developing a mind of my own.<\/p>\n
But my background of no education, bigotry and all that awfulness makes me feel like the impostor in the room. Despite all I have learned, I still feel uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Near Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, 1961<\/p>\n
By the early 1960s, McCullin was freelancing for the Observer and other newspapers and magazines. He and his first wife, Christine, were still living in Finsbury Park in a two-room flat \u2013 one room was bathroom, kitchen and his dark room combined.<\/p>\n
I was sitting in a cafe with my wife in Paris on a belated honeymoon. I saw a man reading Le Figaro, which had a picture of an East German soldier with his Kalashnikov. I said to her: \u201cWhen we go back, would you mind if I went to Berlin?\u201d We\u2019d only been married a few months. I asked the Observer if they wanted pictures, and they said: \u201cWe\u2019re not sending you. It\u2019s up to you if you go or not.\u201d I went with a camera that I had used to photograph the Finsbury Park gang. It was a Rolleicord I had bought when I finished my national service. It was very difficult to compose [pictures with it] because it\u2019s in a square format. I had pawned it once for five quid, and the one decent thing my mother did was she got that camera out. I saw other international photographers arriving, draped in all the latest cameras and I remember feeling shabby.<\/p>\n
Protest picture during the Cuban missile crisis, Whitehall, 1962<\/p>\n
This man ran away from Trafalgar Square and they immediately blocked his way to Whitehall. I did a lot of political demonstrations when I worked on the Observer in the early 60s, and I loved it. There used to be brawls some days, which I could get involved in, photographically. I find this photograph amusing. Despite everything, there is laughter in me. I\u2019ve got a huge sense of humour.<\/p>\n
The Cyprus civil war, Limassol, 1964<\/p>\n
During the first war he covered, McCullin found himself in the middle of a gun battle when Greeks surrounded the Turkish quarter of Limassol. Turkish civilians had hidden in communal buildings, such as cinemas, where this photograph of a Turkish gunman was taken.<\/p>\n
I went into the Observer newspaper \u2013 I had a contract with them for two days a week for 15 guineas \u2013 and the editor said: \u201cWould you consider going to cover the civil war in Cyprus?\u201d I felt as if I was levitating. On my first day in Limassol, I took this picture, by the side of a cinema. It looks like a Hollywood still: the man is far too well dressed. In the evening, when the battle stopped, I had nowhere to stay, and the Turkish police said I could sleep in a cell block. That was my baptism in war.<\/p>\n
On another day, I was walking towards a village, and a British solder said: \u201cDead body up there.\u201d I walked, looking at the ground, afraid to raise my head and I found the first body. I went to a house, knocked on the door, but there was no answer. I gently opened it and the first thing that hit me was a warm smell of blood. There was blood all over the floor. There were two dead brothers, and their father was in the kitchen at the back, murdered by the Greeks. I was in the house, photographing, when suddenly the door opened and several people came in, including a woman, crying for her dead husband, who she\u2019d only married a couple of weeks before. I thought, \u201cThey\u2019re going to attack me\u201d, but they didn\u2019t. They were very generous towards me.<\/p>\n
I felt I had chosen the right thing to do, because I found what I was photographing so outrageous that I couldn\u2019t wait to get back to England and see my pictures published, to show the world how wrong it was. When you\u2019re young and ambitious, you haven\u2019t really worked it all out. You\u2019re drawn to this tragedy, but it doesn\u2019t belong to you \u2013 you\u2019re imposing yourself upon the situation. You\u2019re not welcome or invited and you\u2019re stealing in a way. You\u2019re stealing other people\u2019s emotional tragedies. You\u2019re stealing images of people, dead, who haven\u2019t given you consent. I was aware it wasn\u2019t totally right, and I believe it to this day. That\u2019s why I come back here and do the English landscape. I feel as if I have to release myself from my guilt, which I still carry.<\/p>\n
Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tortured, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1964<\/p>\n
The German magazine Quick sent McCullin to cover events in DRC, where followers of the assassinated prime minister Patrice Lumumba had captured the eastern part of the country. Arriving in what was then L\u00e9opoldville (now Kinshasa), he discovered members of the media were being banned from leaving. Meeting a mercenary in his hotel bar, one of many mercenaries employed by the government to fight the rebels, McCullin persuaded him to lend him a uniform and get him on a military plane to the rebel stronghold Stanleyville (now Kisangani).<\/p>\n
I got on the runway in the early morning and before I got on the plane, they were running off people\u2019s names. I thought: \u201cOh my God, they\u2019re going to discover I\u2019m not a mercenary.\u201d The guy said: \u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d I said: \u201cMcCullin.\u201d He said: \u201cGet on the plane\u201d, and I flew 1,000km to where [military leader] Joseph-D\u00e9sir\u00e9 Mobutu said no press were allowed to go. When I got to the other end, I found [the loyalist gendarmerie] were torturing boys as young as 17 and maybe younger. They were shooting them in the back of the head and kicking them in the river. These boys were Lumumbist. They were beating them; one of the boys had been stabbed in the face with a knife.<\/p>\n
Sheep going to slaughter, London, 1965<\/p>\n
That was on the Caledonian Road, where there used to be big abattoirs on either side. I was working on a magazine story with the writer Eric Newby, who has long died. So many people I\u2019ve worked with have died, I feel as if I\u2019m one of the few left who knew this world I worked in.<\/p>\n
Grenade thrower, Hue, Vietnam, 1968<\/p>\n
McCullin went to cover the Vietnam war for the first time in 1965, and returned several times.<\/p>\n
I joined these US marines, and they said it was going to be a 24-hour operation in the ancient city of Hue. Twelve days later, we were still there \u2013 they got a terrible hiding. They lost about 40 men; a sniper was picking them off every day. You can see the devastation in this photograph. I slept in a hut, on the floor, under a table, using my helmet as a pillow. I loved being tested to the limit. In the mornings, I always left the hut one way, and then one day I decided to turn another way. Behind the hut, I found a dead North Vietnamese soldier who had been lying almost head-to-head with me. He was about 18, his eyes were open and full of rainwater.<\/p>\n
Shell-shocked US marine, Hue, Vietnam, 1968<\/p>\n
I am slightly fed up with my more known pictures, because they\u2019re classically, iconically composed. So what are they saying? They could almost be negative because they\u2019re too perfectly designed by me, and people would say: \u201cIt\u2019s almost artistic.\u201d I\u2019m afraid of falling off that very fine line.<\/p>\n
I never harmed any of the people in my pictures. I didn\u2019t kill them. I didn\u2019t torture them, the way this man has been tortured by his own breakdown.<\/p>\n
Every night, I remember the battle that that man was in. I didn\u2019t get his damaged brain, but my brain has never been free of certain images. I have bad dreams and this pause every night before I sleep, but I\u2019ve never suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.<\/p>\n
I was moving fast. I would go straight back to another war. There\u2019s an adrenaline rush. It\u2019s all very selfish and stupid, but you\u2019re not telling the truth if you say you didn\u2019t find some sides of it exciting. The excitement of incoming shells. But then you think, \u201cThat shell just blew some guy\u2019s leg off,\u201d or killed another four or five guys. I\u2019ve been swimming in a whirlpool of huge misadventure, and it\u2019s been a cesspit, really, my life. There\u2019s no other way of describing it.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve risked my life a few times. I was in a gun battle once in Cyprus, and I saw an old lady who couldn\u2019t walk. I thought, if someone doesn\u2019t do something, that old girl is going to die in the next five minutes. I gave my friend my cameras and ran and picked her up and then ran back with her. I thought: \u201cI can\u2019t keep taking all the time. You\u2019ve got to do something, give something back.\u201d In Vietnam, I carried a soldier away from battle on my shoulders. He had been hit by a bullet and was in such pain. I thought: \u201cI\u2019ve been stealing all these years. I\u2019ve got to hand some of that back.\u201d But you risk your life doing it.<\/p>\n
Starving boy, Biafra, 1968<\/p>\n
The day after his third child was born, McCullin left to cover the war that had broken out since Biafra had broken away from Nigeria in 1967. After witnessing battles, executions and more horrors, then coming down with malaria, McCullin was about to see the sights that would probably haunt him most, at a hospital for war-orphaned children, where hundreds were starving.<\/p>\n
This is possibly the most atrocious picture I\u2019ve ever taken in my life. There were 600 children dying in this camp. They were dropping down and dying in front of me. When they see white people, they think you\u2019re an aid worker coming to bring them food. So you can understand my guilt, can\u2019t you? It was not kind of me to be there, really.<\/p>\n
That boy is holding a tin of corned beef, which he had completely licked dry to get every gram. I gave him a barley sugar sweet, which I had in my pocket, and he went away, licking it. I went off and spoke to a M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res doctor, and I felt someone take hold of my hand. It was the boy. It made me feel so bloody guilty.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t printed that picture for nearly 30 years now. I don\u2019t want to see it coming up in the dark room. I even feel guilty that these pictures \u2013 I have about 70,000 negatives \u2013 are in the house.<\/p>\n
Homeless Irish man, London, 1969<\/p>\n
There are social wars on your doorstep. People used to write me letters, saying, \u201cI want to be a war photographer.\u201d I\u2019d say: \u201cHelp yourself \u2013 it\u2019s in your cities.\u201d This man slept by a fire in Spitalfields market, very close to the City of London, which generates billions and billions of pounds for the people who own it. You couldn\u2019t have more of a contrast. One side is everything, and the other side is nothing.<\/p>\n
I call this picture Neptune, because he looks like the sea god. I thought he was one of the most handsome men I had ever seen.<\/p>\n
Catholic youth escaping CS gas fired by British soldiers, Londonderry, 1971<\/p>\n
During the late 1960s, McCullin was barely home. He covered war in Chad and trekked to rebel camps in Eritrea. Even though he was injured while photographing the civil war in Cambodia \u2013 watching the man who had taken the full force of the mortar blast die in front of him on the way to hospital \u2013 he was back several months later. He photographed tribes in the Amazon rainforest, whose lands were being taken, and the refugee crisis caused by war in Pakistan. On that particular trip, McCullin decided he was more interested in showing the impact of violence on civilians \u2013 something he was able to do in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n
I spent six weeks in Northern Ireland. This is the gassing, in the Bogside area, of Catholic youths. I got gassed really badly that day, and hit in the back with a rubber bullet. I was led away, totally blind, into a house where there was a hell of a lot of swearing and shouting. \u201cGet him a damp cloth!\u201d It was chaotic.<\/p>\n
Man and British soldier, Londonderry, 1971<\/p>\n
That man is coming home from work and that soldier\u2019s behaving like a soldier. It does seem to be the extreme contrast of a normal man coming back from a normal day, having to share the street.<\/p>\n
Local boys in Bradford, 1972Local Boys in Bradford 1972 Photograph: Copyright: Don McCullin\/Courtesy The Tate<\/p>\n
Back from whatever war zone he had been sent to, McCullin would set himself photographic projects. He often went to the north of England, drawn to documenting people\u2019s hard lives in run-down industrial landscapes.<\/p>\n
I used to walk the streets, and the people in the north are very friendly, a lot more trusting than the people in the south. I went to Bradford, and I saw that amazing slogan on the wall, against the racism of that period. I\u2019m proud of my work in the north of England. I was evacuated as a child to Lancashire, to a chicken farm for 18 weeks, and I had a really horrible time. That is one reason why I don\u2019t treat other people badly.<\/p>\n
If I had been to university, I think I would have been a more sensitive person, even more than I already am, and I would not have been able to sleep among dead bodies and rat-infested trenches and things like that. Also, I knew how to conduct myself. You smell poverty when you go into a house and it smells just like the house I grew up in as a boy.<\/p>\n
A winter\u2019s victim, Hertfordshire, undated<\/p>\n
In 1972, McCullin and other journalists were captured in Uganda, and he was sure he would die in the notorious Makindye prison, listening to fellow prisoners being taken away to be beaten or executed, and watching trucks taking bodies away. After four days, he was released and deported, arriving home to his family \u2013 now living in a farmhouse in Hertfordshire.<\/p>\n
I found this sparrow outside my house one day, at dusk. I\u2019ve got good eyes, I spot stuff on the floor, everywhere. I kind of X-ray things.<\/p>\n
Young Christians celebrating the death of a Palestinian girl, Beirut, 1976<\/p>\n
Having been to Lebanon several times in the 1960s, when Beirut was a decadent playground for the rich, McCullin returned to cover the civil war in the mid-1970s. Arriving in Beirut, he decided attaching himself to the Christian Phalange militia would give him the best access. Over the next few days, he photographed the massacres in a district in east Beirut populated largely by Palestinians \u2013 which would put McCullin\u2019s name on a death warrant.<\/p>\n
One morning I was told: \u201cWe\u2019re going to Karantina and we\u2019re going to clear out the rats.\u201d They meant Palestinians. I slept in the morgue that night and then in the early morning, they attacked the area.<\/p>\n
I was told to leave the area by the Christians. They said: \u201cIf we see you taking any more photographs, we\u2019re going to kill you.\u201d I\u2019d been watching them kill Palestinians in groups, pouring magazines into men\u2019s heads and exploding them. I was leaving when I heard this strange music and I saw this. This is a dead Palestinian girl lying in the rain, and this boy had a mandolin, which he found in one of the houses. He couldn\u2019t play it, but he was giving the impression that he was serenading the death of this girl. I was looking around, thinking: \u201cI\u2019ve got to get this picture.\u201d I took it very quickly.<\/p>\n
Dew pond, Somerset, 1988<\/p>\n
By the mid-1980s, McCullin\u2019s type of work had fallen out of favour at the Sunday Times, newly acquired by Rupert Murdoch, and he left. Personally, it had also been a difficult time \u2013 he had been injured in El Salvador, after falling off a roof in a gun battle, and he left his first wife for the woman who would become his second, something he says he still feels guilty about (he has been married to his third wife, Catherine, a writer and podcaster, for more than 20 years). Money was short, and he turned to advertising photography, even though it didn\u2019t fulfil him. Moving to Somerset, he found peace in photographing the landscape around his new home.<\/p>\n
Dew ponds are very rare things. They are almost mythological. They\u2019re completely round, and this one was at the foot of a hill fort. We\u2019re surrounded here in Somerset by history and myth. I use that. This was in the early morning, but I usually work in the evening, when the sun is going down.<\/p>\n
I can stand in these fields for two or three hours and not get a picture. That doesn\u2019t mean to say I\u2019m disappointed, I\u2019ve had the privilege of standing there. There\u2019s nothing greater.<\/p>\n
Photojournalism has taken a nosedive, and it\u2019s because newspaper proprietors want beautiful women, rich people, celebrities. They do not want my kind of pictures in their paper, spoiling their day. They don\u2019t want that tragedy.<\/p>\n
Tulips with a mind of their own, undated<\/p>\n
I study things. You watch tulips, they start in a very kind of pristine way, and in the end they start dancing in different directions. This is free of charge, a total joy ride. They can\u2019t say to me: \u201cDon\u2019t photograph us in our deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n
The road to the Somme, France, 1999<\/p>\n
I was commissioned by Royal Mail to create a commemorative stamp of the first world war. I was in a French bistro one day having lunch and it had been raining. I was going back when I suddenly saw this silvery wet road, and I swung my car around. I thought that that horizon would be the huge graveyard of thousands of men who didn\u2019t want to die, men who hadn\u2019t had a life at the age of 18 and younger.<\/p>\n
Refugee camp, Chad, 2007<\/p>\n
I was sent by Oxfam to photograph refugee camps in Chad [people fleeing violence in Darfur].<\/p>\n
In places I\u2019ve worked, I have seen television crews coming in, treading on kids and pushing people around, thinking they are more important. I\u2019ve always been tough with those people \u2013 growing up in Finsbury Park meant I wasn\u2019t a pushover. But when it comes to my work, I am very sensitive, very polite. I\u2019m a human being. I would never have got pictures of people who are injured and angry and hurt without that, and I\u2019ve managed to allow them to give me that moment of trust. If I wasn\u2019t thinking like that, my pictures wouldn\u2019t have a sensitive way of trying to speak to you.<\/p>\n
The exhibition Don McCullin: A Desecrated Serenity<\/a> is at Hauser & Wirth, New York, until 8 November. McCullin\u2019s new book of still lifes and landscapes, The Stillness of Life, is published by Gost Books, price \u00a380.<\/p>\n All Photographs copyright Don McCullin. The photos Saner and McCullin discussed were chosen by picture editor Sarah Gilbert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Don McCullin photographed at his home in Somerset, October 2025 War photographers are not meant to reach 90.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247214,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-247213","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247213\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}