Don McCullin was with a US soldier on the fortified walls surrounding the Vietnamese city of Hué one night when he noticed something in the dark. “A hand grenade had been tossed over. We both looked at it. Then the soldier went one way and I went the other. It exploded. I thought I’d lost my leg but I was lucky. The explosion hit the other guy, killed him. I photographed him dying with blood coming out of his nose and a river of blood coming out of his head because it blew the back of his skull out.”
He shows me a new print he’s made of that image, blood still glistening 54 years on. That could have been you, I say. “Easily. The easiest thing in the world, you’d think, is pressing that button on the camera. It’s not. It’s the hardest thing. When I go to bed every night, I think about that battle.” The photographer, now 86, is recalling the 1968 Tet offensive during which, he says, the ancient imperial city of Hué was destroyed by US forces in 12 days. “I would see their Phantom bombers coming at me unleashing napalm, which comes in a tube nearly the length of this room – and they’d be tumbling towards you.”
We’re sitting in a darkened room in his Somerset home, where he lives with his third wife, Catherine. On the terrace outside, it’s an exquisite summer’s day. From there, we could have sat and savoured the lush fields rolling down to the trout stream and the cider orchard beyond, a part of this 20-acre estate. But McCullin prefers what he calls the “Rembrandt light” indoors. “I like my pictures to be dark and I like being in the dark.” He never photographs Somerset in its summery pomp but rather waits for the winter, when the leaves have gone. Then he heads to the Levels, the watery flatlands whipped by the west wind, to photograph the majestic bleakness.
When the war chronicler first tasked himself with capturing some English whimsy, darkness still followed him like a black dog. He was driving with his wife to Cambridge when he spotted a man in a top hat selling ice cream from a barrow. Mice were running around the brim of his headwear. Captivated, he asked to visit the man, called Snowy, at home to take his picture. “He put a mouse into his beard and it climbed into his mouth. Then he went away and came back with a big rake. I said, ‘Snowy, that cat has just killed one of your mice.’ He picked up the cat and started bashing it like in Tom and Jerry. This old man who everybody thought was sweet is an illustration of the kind of people who are out there. Wherever I go, there seems to be violence and death. You can’t miss in England.”
Other images haunt him at night. A few months after surviving Hué, McCullin was covering the Biafran war in south-eastern Nigeria. “Can you imagine in Biafra a million died of starvation? I stood in front of 600 children at a school who were standing on legs that could barely carry them. They were dropping down in front of me and dying.” He pauses. “I’m talking as if I’m completely mad and a liar and imagining these things. I question myself all the time. But it did happen. I have the pictures to prove it.”
We’re meeting because Don McCullin CBE is being given a lifetime achievement medal by the London design festival. Previous winners include Vivienne Westwood, Dieter Rams and Richard Rogers. “It’s nice to feel the work you’ve done over 60-odd years is welcome,” he says.
Susan Sontag once praised McCullin’s “exemplary, gut-wrenching work”. She wrote: “There can be no doubt of the intentions of this tenacious, impassioned witness, bringing back his news from hell. He wants to sadden. He means to arouse.” Not everyone agreed. “I once went to the BBC to do an interview and the engineer walked off, saying, ‘I’m not going to be in the same room as that bastard who makes his living photographing victims of war.’ And I said, ‘That’s perfectly understandable.’ It was the only time I can recall that I was attacked. I’m astonished it hasn’t happened more often.”
Has he profited from others’ suffering? “I certainly feel guilty. I’m constantly persecuting myself with thoughts that make me uncomfortable. They snatch away the joy I could probably have enjoyed. But your moral compass has to have some balance. You can’t just fill your pockets with gold. I think that’s why my pictures are so disturbing-looking.”
I suggest it may also be because so many of his subjects are looking right back at the camera. I’m thinking of such renowned images as the shell-shocked US marine in Hué in 1968; or the image captioned “Tormented, homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London, 1969”; or the nameless Cambodian boy, his chest hideously lacerated, lying in a bed at an overcrowded Phnom Penh hospital in 1975. “The story totally comes from their eyes,” he agrees. “I’ve almost encouraged people just to look at me, because they will tell you the story without opening their mouths. I did a lot of action photographs, of men throwing grenades. But that’s Hollywood in a way. That’s not the image of war. War is the human face. That is the story of war. It’s what the face tells you of the soul.”
McCullin traces his lifelong obsession with depicting human suffering to his rough childhood in London. “People say to me Finsbury Park has been gentrified. I say it’s not possible.” Well, there’s a Gail’s bakery at the tube station now, as well as a cinema, a theatre and a thriving al fresco coffee culture. The eyes of McCullin, through bushy brows, look doubtful.
“There was always fighting. You fought, you got terrible hidings, then you went home and Mum gave you a hiding.” Of all the horrible stories he tells me from those days, one stands out. I laugh as he tells me about “the slightly mad boy” who bit a police dog. Then, typically, McCullin wipes the smile off my face. “He was so disturbed that he hanged himself. The idea that someone hanged themselves in a flower shop, which is meant to give joy … There was sadness within the walls of that shop. It was as if someone was constantly tripping you over. As a poor person, I think the beginning of your life is one of continual betrayal.”
One day, he was chasing after a girl in the rain. She was screaming in mock fear. “We were playing. But a policeman stepped out of the shadows and clouted me with his oilskin cape. I never trusted the police.” Parallel to the road he lived on was “the Bunk”, reputedly the worst street in London, where cops would only venture mob-handed. So McCullin was raised in perhaps the second-toughest street in London, by a hard-drinking, free-swearing mother.
He left school early and got wanderlust, first working in the restaurant cars of London to Manchester trains, then doing national service in the RAF, where he also picked up the rudiments of photography. “I failed the RAF’s theory exam for photography because I couldn’t explain what I knew.”
Back home, he took pictures of his new West Indian neighbours. “I have one amazing picture of them playing dominoes in their back garden with about 500 empty beer bottles. I feel for them because they came with such a spirit of love and trust in this country and they were totally betrayed, not at the time, but several years later with the Windrush scandal.” He rarely goes back. “Why would I want to when I’ve got this? You’d have to whip me to go back.” A few years ago, though, a BBC film crew persuaded him to return. “Where we lived was a filthy, stinking dump,” he says. “But this lovely West Indian lady had made it into something really beautiful.”
Among the hooligans and ex-cons he hung out with as a kid were a bunch of dapper hardcases known as The Guvnors. He shot them in the ruins of a building in 1958, posed and scary in their Sunday suits. He sold the picture to the Observer and the picture editor liked it so much that McCullin was soon being sent on foreign assignments, first to Berlin, then Cyprus. He spent his 1960s and 1970s in a blur of horror: Biafra, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Beirut, Bangladesh. And back home: Bradford, Scarborough, London’s East End. The world rendered in black and white, darkness sweeping over every frame.
Some have supposed McCullin a Catholic, compelled to bear witness to human suffering and tormented with guilt for doing so. He denies that. “I was 13 when my father died. He meant a lot to me. But for him to die weighing seven stone and enfeebled by asthma told me there was no God.”
Still, his photographs of war and suffering had a moral aim, which he once described as to “break the hearts and spirits of secure people”. Today he says: “There is no photojournalism any more.” He sees nothing to impress him in photographs that have emerged from Ukraine, and derides photographer Annie Leibovitz for her recent Vogue magazine portraits of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and first lady Olena Zelenska. Photojournalism, he believes, was once an invitation to pay attention, but now focuses on things that barely deserve it: not much impassioned tenacity in that Vogue shoot, little to unsettle the secure.
Photojournalism died, at least for McCullin, 40 years ago when two things happened. Andrew Neil fired him from the Sunday Times where, until Rupert Murdoch took over the paper, he had spent 18 fulfilling years under the editorship of the legendary Harold Evans. And in 1982 he was refused permission to sail with the British task force to the Falklands, probably for fear that his MO of depicting human suffering was inimical to the propaganda the government sought to relay. Photography, McCullin thinks, has dealt in celebrity and propaganda ever since, the very things his work stood out against.
He has no interest in plundering his own life for material. He has no selfies, no Instagram. He tells me that all the sons from his three marriages are 6ft tall and always stand on tiptoes to make him look smaller in family snapshots. But he doesn’t show me anything from the family album. It’s off limits. “I live very privately and I don’t get anyone bothering me. I like it that way.”
McCullin describes his West Country home as a sanctuary from the horrors of the world. “I’ve got that landscape where I can walk out and, like a snake, feel like I’m shedding a guilty skin.” Yet his life has had its tragedies. On his first son’s wedding day, 30-odd years ago, he woke up on the sofa: he and his first wife Christine were sleeping separately because he’d had an affair. “I went up to her room and she was sitting up in bed and she was dead,” he says. “I put my arm around her and she was warm at the back and cold at the front and it was seven in the morning on a perfect summer’s day. I thought I could handle anything and it was a real kick in the teeth.”
Evans once wrote of his chief photographer that he may seem like a “macho man in combat gear, but Don McCullin is an aesthete”. McCullin has just completed a long project about the sites of the Roman Empire, that took him from Hadrian’s Wall to Palmyra in Syria. And he takes a moral lesson from what he photographs, namely the barbarism beneath civilisation’s facade; the ugliness that made its splendour possible. “The Romans were always at war so when I stand in front of the great Roman sites, I don’t feel comfortable – because I’m enjoying myself. ‘Hold on a minute,’ I think. ‘Wasn’t that created by slave labour?’ And it usually was.”
He mentions the Temple of Baalbek in present-day Lebanon. “It wasn’t put there by idle hands. When you look at something really beautiful, you have to think. I’m always at odds with myself. The guilt thing is recognising it’s beautiful, and that I’m trying to make it even more beautiful in my pictures. Should I do that? What do I do? Just put my camera in the bag and don’t do it?”
Now that his Roman series is complete, he has a yearning to photograph the Parthenon Marbles. He wants to keep working but can’t spend as much time in his beloved darkroom as he’d like because the chemicals are bad for his health. He suffers from asthma and had a toe amputated last year. “Didn’t do any good.” He shows me his latest work: huge and lovely images of classical statues from museums around the world, made into inkjet prints by a friend. He’s having to learn to cede control to others which, perhaps, for someone who regards himself as a self-made man who got out of the badlands by the skin of his teeth, doesn’t come naturally.
Among those others is actor, director and UN special envoy for refugees Angelina Jolie. She invited McCullin to Rome recently to discuss her plan to make a film of his life, based on his 2002 autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. Tom Hardy was initially rumoured to be lined up to play him, but was apparently deemed too old. “She’s an incredibly lovely woman,” says McCullin. “She’s determined to make this. She said, ‘I’ve got an office in LA with all your pictures on the wall and I want to do this.’” Photojournalism isn’t quite dead then: it still speaks from the walls to Angelina Jolie.
McCullin declines to suggest who should play him in the film. “We’ll see. I’m too old to have any ambitions and desires about my life. It’s nearly over. I don’t want to be idle though. I’ve got plans to go to all kinds of places. I don’t want to sit in this house waiting to die.”
Later, he drives me and our photographer back to the station, racing to make the train. “I love this,” he shouts as we barrel along the Somerset lanes. “The adrenaline!” It reminds of him of the thrill of war photography, the excitement of kicking down doors and being where he shouldn’t be. “I loved it. I’d never complain about it. I’m the one who went down that road. I’m the one who sought out this life.”
• The London design festival runs from 17 to 25 September.
