BLEAK BEAUTY

When Don McCullin shows me around his garden in a village in the heart of Somerset he is more the country squire than the world-famous war photographer. It is a lovely garden, well tended but not manicured, drenched in birdsong, and he takes great pride in his trees – an old oak, a beech, a sycamore, a cherry. McCullin has a beguiling voice and a curiously touching way of phrasing things: he marvels that his ancient apple tree is ‘still offering fruit’, and he is proud of the new gates he got from the reclamation centre to separate his land from the road (‘the English are a thieving lot’).

McCullin is 77, but looks more handsome, in a clapped-out sort of way, than he did when he was young. He had a stroke and a quadruple bypass two years ago, and his feet hurt now, and his hands. ‘It’s definitely arthritis,’ he says. ‘Fifty-five years in the darkroom, in icy wintry water.’ He lives with his third wife, Catherine Fairweather (who works in London during the week), and their son, Max, 11, but for 16 of the 30 years he has lived here, he was alone and wifeless, spending most of his time in his darkroom. ‘It’s allowed me to turn my energy to my work,’ he says.

McCullin is currently making beautiful prints for the 25th Visa pour l’Image at Perpignan, the primary festival for photojournalism in Europe, where he has been invited to exhibit. He is meticulous and perfectionist, a master of his craft: he clearly loves printing, and does all his own spotting (hand-retouching). ‘Bringing these pictures back from the wars as I did in the past, I always wanted to give a bit more elbow to them, because I wanted the viewer not to miss it. The subject matter is bad enough, but I used to think, I can inject more into this picture,’ he says.

You get a glimpse of his former life as he relates, in his measured voice, in this sylvan setting, some of the horror and cruelty he has seen: people skinned alive in Congo and murdered with sledgehammers in Uganda; old people shot for no reason in Cyprus; a starving albino boy in Biafra who could barely walk but followed him around, trying to hold his hand; teenagers playing a mandolin next to a corpse in Beirut; appalling things done in the name of Christianity; a Scottish mercenary who had been locked up in Zaire and had set out to shoot an African for every day he had spent behind bars. All this lives in his head; it resides there, churning away. These tales are part of his repertoire, and they torment him. ‘For every great day I have, I know I have to share it with these horrible, bloody stories.’

There must have been some beauty, too, I say.

‘It’s funny you should bring a word like “beauty” into the bearpit. A lot of people would say, “What the hell are you talking about?” But there is beauty in war. It’s never far away, even if it’s the last thing you can imagine, you will see it. I’ve seen black and white men crying over each other’s demises, men tenderly cradling the wounded, and caring. That’s what beauty is all about. It’s not about trees or sunsets, it’s about human depth.’

He leads the way into his darkroom, formerly the scullery (‘come and see the gruesome side of life…’). He says it’s haunted, and it’s not surprising when you think of the images that have been revealed there. Don McCullin will always be renowned as a war photographer, even though he has also created wonderful travel pictures and landscapes. It’s a mantle he would like to be rid of, but he is resigned to it. In fact it is his pictures of civilians caught up in war that are often the most affecting. As he says, they are the ones who are worst off, without the back-up that the military have. His photographs are often upsetting, but it is his extreme sensitivity in depicting brutality that is so remarkable. His compositions are painterly and Goya-esque, and he is able to convey the complex nature of conflict with one picture. It takes time to get these photographs, and a lot of courage, too.

In the old days McCullin used to go into his darkroom at 6am and stay until mid-afternoon, listening to classical music while he worked. The music gave him hope and helped to reconcile conflicting emotions; it made him forget and understand himself simultaneously. But all that ingesting of chemicals has not been good for him. ‘It’s too much for me now; the acids make me sick,’ he says, adding that it is probably the equivalent of smoking ‘50 fags a day’. He has 60,000 negatives stored in locked filing cabinets. He goes over them frequently, looking for things he has missed. He also has 5,000 prints. His archive is stored in the print room: shelves of boxes, all neatly labelled in slightly childish handwriting: very best prints – to be used for exhibitions.

‘Would you like to see one of my platinum prints so I can show you how beautiful they are?’ he asks, opening a large box. Inside is a note saying, not to be sold in any circumstances unless catherine and max are in dire straits. ‘I always leave notes in case I die.’ He takes out a sublime picture of people on the Omo river, in Ethiopia. ‘You see what I mean? The most beautiful things you’ve ever seen.’ Each one costs about £1,000 to make. ‘I’d like to make some more but I can’t afford to. I have to think about Max’s education.’

McCullin sells some pictures through Hamiltons gallery in London (‘for a few thousand quid, but don’t think too badly of me… a Helmut Newton picture not much bigger than this sells for $175,000’), but not his war pictures, which he allows to be seen only in exhibitions or in books. He would not allow those to be displayed as decoration. ‘I have to be careful or eventually they’ll be on T-shirts,’ he says.

He shows me another platinum print, of a tribe in New Guinea, where he went with Norman Lewis in 1992. ‘I am interested in anthropology and I love photographing primitive people, although I hate the word primitive because it’s slightly degrading,’ he says. ‘I really think that if my life had gone down this route, it would have been equally rewarding, without the tragic memories.’

So why didn’t he go down that route sooner?

‘Because this is an indulgence, at the end of my warring days. Even though I went to Syria before Christmas, this is what I really love doing now.’

McCullin attempted to shoot landscapes when he was 40 but says he wasn’t very good at it. In those days he was ‘warred up. I was geared up for war. Then it started damaging my family life. I was always waving goodbye to my wife and children. Once when I was in Cambodia, at the fall of Phnom Penh, I got a one-line telegram. It was from my wife Christine. It said, have you totally forgotten we exist?’

Don McCullin is diffident about his talent. ‘I’ve only got one good thing about me, I think, and it’s my eyes. They’ve never let me down. In photography you have to be aware of what might happen next, very quickly. So you’re constantly leapfrogging ahead with your eyes and your imagination.’ As a child he always had a strong visual sense. ‘I just didn’t have a camera. I used to like drawing as a kid – my dad used to let me draw on the walls, as where we lived was such a dump anyway.’ He grew up in a rough tenement in Finsbury Park, north London, with a sister, Marie, and brother, Michael (who later joined the Foreign Legion). At 14 he won an art scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Building Arts and Crafts, but he couldn’t take it up because his father died of asthma the same year, and he had to go out to work. After working in railway dining cars, he got a job at WM Larkins Studio, an animation studio in Mayfair, followed by national service in the Royal Air Force, where he worked first painting numbers on cans of film and then as a photography assistant, processing film from the bombers who came back. He spent his life savings of £30 on his first camera, a Rolleicord, which he pawned when he returned to civilian life – his mother retrieved it.

It was rough in Finsbury Park. Rough and bigoted and violent, and many of his friends went to prison. McCullin took photographs of the local gang he used to hang out with, the Guvnors. Then when gang culture got into the news, the people at Larkins suggested he present his photographs to the Observer, which printed his picture of the Guvnors, artfully posed in a bombed house, on February 15 1959.

In his book Unreasonable Behaviour (1992) McCullin writes, ‘That one picture changed my life. People have told me that if I had not made a breakthrough with that photograph, then I would have done so with another. I don’t think that would necessarily have been the case. I had a low tolerance of rejection, and no burning desire to be a photo­grapher. If I had been obliged to battle my way into Fleet Street, I would never have got there.’

It is an interesting sentiment because in his subsequent career he showed an extraordinary degree of determination to get the photographs he did.

More work came his way, and he began to learn his craft on the job. During a Telegraph assignment on the Arthurian legend he went to Glastonbury, where he came across a collection of photographic books in an antique shop. He bought them – he still has them today – they were really heavy and tied up with twine, and he had to carry them back to the railway station. He read them all – weighty books about Frederick Evans, who photographed the interiors of cathedrals and cloisters, and Alfred Stieglitz – and taught himself photography. ‘So you see it was nothing to do with war, it was originally to do with the beautiful,’ he says.

It was hard, because he was dyslexic, but he didn’t need the words. ‘It was the pictures I needed. Then I studied Henri Cartier Bresson, and a man called Eugene Smith, who was the founder of true composition. I met Jacques Henri Lartigue and I met Francis Bacon, and amazing writers such as Norman Lewis. Those are the people who shaped me.’

In 1966 he went to the Sunday Times, where he worked under the enlightened editorship of Harold Evans. In those days the Sunday Times Magazine would publish 12-page spreads of his work, and he travelled all over the world, starting in Cyprus. ‘I was very naive. I used to run around in front of the firing and think I could outrun the bullets. I was such a prat. I could have been killed so many times.’

He joined mercenaries in Congo, photographed the Klan in Mississippi, covered famine in Biafra, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland; he was thrown in jail in Uganda; he went to Cambodia, Lebanon and El Salvador, where he broke his arm in five places falling off a roof. The only wars he missed and would like to have covered were Chechnya and the Falklands – he was furious when the Foreign Office refused him permission, claiming the boat was full. In the early days he found it all tremendously thrilling. ‘When I went to Saigon it was the most exciting place in the world, like Berlin in 1961,’ he says. ‘I’d go into the streets and feel as if I was being trailed by Graham Greene. Now it’s as if someone’s tipped gallons of bleach and sanitation everywhere. It’s totally clean and boring. That’s the price of peace – it cost two million lives and that’s what it’s brought to Vietnam: capitalism and sanitation.’

(We are standing in the tidy kitchen, and McCullin is off on what his wife calls ‘the morning rant’, usually triggered by John Humphrys and the Today programme. Today’s topics are the Middle East – ‘Blair’s been there a hundred times and what’s he achieved? Absolutely nothing’ – and newspapers’ obsession ‘with Beyoncé’s outfits and Rooney’s pay packet’.)

Mixed in with the excitement there have been sobering moments of personal tragedy. He lost a great friend, the renowned journalist Nicholas Tomalin, at the Golan Heights when they were covering the Yom Kippur War in 1973: Tomalin, 42, borrowed a combat vest from McCullin and went ahead of the rest of the team, paired up with a photographer from Stern; their car was hit by a Syrian missile. McCullin, hoping he might still be alive, took a huge personal risk to reach him.

Sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he goes over and over that day. He thinks, wouldn’t it be amazing if Tomalin had been alive when he’d reached him. He thinks about how he would have lifted him on to his shoulders and brought him back. ‘That would have been the crowning of my life – to have saved somebody… but it wasn’t to be.’

Tomalin was unlucky. The journalist Philip Jacobson, who worked with McCullin in those days, says you had to be prepared to go where he went, which might be tough, but that he wasn’t reckless. ‘When things turned nasty Don had a good instinct for getting out, which is why he’s still alive, despite having a few bullet holes in him. There’s loads of gung-ho young photographers, all of whom want to be McCullin, who take tremendous risks and get killed, particularly now in places such as Syria, because everyone wants to push that extra bit without necessarily understanding the circumstances and what might be lying around the corner.’

McCullin left the Sunday Times after 18 years, following the takeover of the paper by Rupert Murdoch. His last major war assignment for the magazine was Beirut in 1982. It left him with some appalling memories. In Sabra he visited a heavily shelled mental hospital where one nurse had stayed behind. She opened the door to a small room where children had been shut up for their own protection. ‘It was possibly one of the worst days of my life,’ he says now. ‘Seeing all those children, who’d been locked in a cupboard, come streaming out in their own mess, blind and insane. They looked like newborn rats; they were pink and naked and stinking of their own filth. That was the lowest thing I have ever seen in my life concerning humanity.’

If he could erase it from his history, would he?

‘No, because I’d have to learn that pain again. It’s about journeying, journeying into nightmares and pain.’

Why didn’t he photograph it? Was it too awful to photograph?

‘No,’ he says. ‘It was too dark. If I’d had a digital camera like I’ve got now, I could have done it.’

Is there a situation that would be too awful for him to photograph? Early on, he says, he refused to photograph a public execution in Saigon. It was all set up (‘like Gilbert and Sullivan’), and he didn’t want to legitimise murder. ‘You have to be morally selective but you can’t go round sieving through what’s right and wrong. None of it is right, it’s all wrong.’

McCullin doesn’t exploit people, and he doesn’t manipulate things to create his images. (Unlike another photographer he came across, who asked a member of the Khmer Rouge to cut off the heads of his victims and hold them up for the camera.) Except once. In 1968 he came across a dead Vietnamese soldier. He says, ‘I saw his body being looted, picked over by these Americans who called him a gook, and when they kicked his stuff away and left, I thought, no, this is not right, I’m going to say something.

I’m going to speak for this dead soldier… these Vietnamese boys came all the way from Hanoi wearing shoes made from rubber tyres and carrying small sacks of rice and pathetic little pictures of their wives and families. You have to respect them.’ McCullin arranged the soldier’s possessions next to his corpse and shot the picture.

‘I have been privy to all kinds of information, which I have turned into pictures. It could be argued now, was it worth it? What has it changed? Absolutely nothing.’ What if someone said that one of his photographs had changed their life? ‘They do say that, actually,’ he admits. But the only satisfaction he has got from that was when someone he met in Africa told him she had become a doctor after seeing one of his pictures. ‘I can peel off stories left, right and centre like this, but it still doesn’t make me feel proud of myself.’

He is his own worst critic. ‘I suppose that’s why I blab on about it, really, because I feel uncomfortable. I feel uncomfortable about living here. I feel uncomfortable about being alive. I survive because I’ve got a new family who I wouldn’t want to abandon, and I still have an original family out there [he has four sons and a daughter in total]. I want to stay alive, but it’s not easy thinking about all the laurels I’ve acquired. They don’t sit well on my crown.’

And the laurels have been considerable. In 1993 he was the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE; he has had countless prestigious exhibitions, and published many books of photographs. Last year an acclaimed documentary, McCullin, made by Jacqui and David Morris, was nominated for two Baftas.

What he has seen, he says now, should have driven him mad. ‘That should have been the outcome. But I managed to mess up my marriages…’

There have been three. He married his first wife, Christine, in 1960, and they had three children, Paul, Jessica and Alexander. He was simply not there much – he was always at a war. In 1982 he left Christine for Laraine Ashton, who started the model agency IMG. He has never really forgiven himself for this, and in his book he describes it as ‘the most painful thing of all in a painful life’. Christine died of a brain tumour on the day of their son’s wedding. She was 48. By then relations between them were better, and the children had forgiven him. But he refers to it now with a sort of quiet agony. ‘Something else to beat myself up about,’ he says.

He had a son, Claude (who has served in Afghanistan in the Royal Marines), with Laraine; they never married and separated after Christine’s death. ‘She decided to marry Terry O’Neill instead of me,’ he says. After a short-lived marriage to Marilyn Bridges, an American photographer, his great friend the travel writer Mark Shand introduced him to his current wife, Catherine Fairweather, at a party. She was 27 years younger than him, and worked at Harper’s Bazaar. ‘I said, “I’d love to work for Harper’s,” but it was only her I was interested in.’ They were married in 2003. ‘I really fell on my feet when I met this girl,’ he says. ‘She’s the kindest, most well educated… she’s lovely. I’m just trying to unravel the assault course of my life, and I’ve been given another chance.’

Philip Jacobson agrees. ‘He has changed in that he’s a much more contented and settled person, and that is largely the result of his marriage to Catherine, and having a child when he was an old man, really, and he loves that countryside around him.’

So it was a surprise to many when last year, at the age of 77, he decided to go to Syria on assignment for The Times. It was arranged through his brother-in-law Richard Beeston, the paper’s foreign editor, who died of cancer earlier this year. ‘He used to come down at weekends, and towards the end of his illness, when he was really suffering, he liked to lie on the sofa and I’d light a fire and we’d chat. He asked if I ever got any twinges, wanting to go back to war, and I said, “I do, as a matter of fact.”’

He was becoming complacent, he says now, and ‘sitting in this tranquil paradise can get boring.’

He went with the war reporter Anthony Lloyd (the author of the book My War Gone By, I Miss it So…, if that’s a clue to the thinking behind that pairing), and the result was slightly uncomfortable: a set of pictures that were by no means vintage McCullin and a rather strange article by Lloyd about having to look after the veteran photographer. Each seemed resentful of the other’s presence (McCullin has never liked working alongside journalists). McCullin defends the quality of the work, which he admits was ‘not very good’, saying, ‘I wasn’t there long enough. I would have liked to stay five weeks. We went in for five days and then it was, “Chop chop, let’s hurry up and get out, it’s dangerous.” That’s not the way I work. I didn’t want to get out, I wanted to stay.’ At one point Lloyd pushed him out of the way and against a wall for his own protection, and McCullin, startled, spun round and tore a ligament in his leg. ‘I thought, Oh, shit, I won’t be able to walk, let alone run.’ In addition he had to wear a heavy bullet-proof vest, the only time he has done so in 50 years of assignments.

What hadn’t changed, though, was war. ‘One day we were in the street, outside what you wouldn’t have recognised as a hospital, and a truck arrived with casualties,’ McCullin says. He saw a young man in the back of the truck staring at him. ‘I thought, why is he looking at me like that? He was dead. Just sitting in the truck looking at me as I’m looking at you and he was completely dead. A young man with black hair and blazing eyes, and I thought, I’m back in the same place that I left in Beirut in 1982. Nothing’s changed, the Middle East is exactly the same.’

In the late afternoon light we sit on the bench at the end of his garden, looking over at the meadow that stretches uphill towards an overgrown orchard. People have been trying to buy this bit of land but McCullin wants to keep it, and he leaves it wild to attract deer. In the early mornings he likes to come and watch them feed in the mist. ‘It’s like having a new heart, to begin the day like that,’ he says gently.

For McCullin, who gave up on God when his father died, photography is an act of devotion. It is his religion. ‘I feel like I’ve had this spiritual journey, in a way,’ he says. ‘I’m always astonished when I wake up every morning and hear the blackbirds singing. I want to say, ‘Thank you, whoever...”’

Don McCullin

Born on October 9 1935, McCullin grew up in Finsbury Park, north London. After a period of national service in the Royal Air Force, where he was a photography assistant, he spent his life savings on a camera. His first published photograph was of his local gang, the Guvnors, printed in the Observer in 1959. He subsequently covered the famine in Biafra, the Vietnam War, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, as well as conflicts in Uganda, Lebanon and El Salvador. In 1977 McCullin was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society; in 1993 he became the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE. McCullin lives in Somerset with his wife and youngest son.