The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
‘Asanold man now,’
says Don Mccullin, ‘I want to be an attractive human being. I don’t want to be a miserable old sod sitting in this chair that needs reupholstering and dying with the chair.’
The chair in question sits bathed in sunlight, next to a window overlooking an unparalleled view of the valley, in Batcombe, Somerset. Mccullin is 88, and has just recently had surgery, as a result of skin cancer. You can’t tell. His distinctive face appears smooth, barely wrinkled, and there is a twinkle in his slightly troubled, very blue eyes.
Mccullin detests being known as a war photographer, but he has been recognised internationally as one of the greatest in the world. His camera captured conflict in Vietnam and Biafra, the Middle East and Northern Ireland. For the past four decades, however, his focus has been on landscapes and architectural remains, as well as the day-to-day lives of people around the world.
He lives in a beautiful house with extensive gardens filled with fruit trees; the River Alham runs nearby. He moved to Batcombe about 40 years ago, when it was like ‘God’s waiting room’, and to his horror it has now, he says, become like Notting Hill. (‘It’s Hauser & Wirth,’ he tells me by way of explanation, referring to the trendy art gallery nearby, which opened in 2014.)
I step over the remains of a mouse on his doormat, the victim of his cat, a sweet little thing known as The Killer. His journalist wife Catherine – currently in Spain – had warned me that Mccullin doesn’t know how to use the coffee machine and I’d be lucky to get a cup of tea, but he immediately offers me one, in his own particular way. Mccullin likes to put a negative spin on things. Even the refreshments. ‘Can you look at this tea and see if you don’t like it?’ he says, handing me a mug. ‘And then you don’t have to drink it.’
‘Want a biscuit? You might not like them. They’ve got sugar in them.’ Later, ‘Is it horrible, that coffee?’ and so on.
Catherine describes him as a ‘humorous miserabilist’. ‘We all fall about laughing at his doom-merchant stance.’
It’s true that quite a lot comes into his line of fire – airports particularly, sodium lamps in London, care homes, expensive hotels, the decline of Radio 3, the newspapers (‘All you ever see is celebrities – photojournalism is dead’), but his complaints are fairly affable.
In reality, Mccullin is also his own worst critic. He once told me that he feels uncomfortable about being alive. ‘I want to stay alive, but it’s not easy thinking about all the laurels I’ve acquired,’ he said. ‘They don’t sit well on my crown.’
And the laurels have been considerable. There have been about 20 books of his work, including the latest, Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor and Life, Death and Everything In Between – the latter of which contains unpublished or little-known images from his archive – and when we meet he is about to open a major retrospective of his work in Rome (based on one he had at Tate Britain in 2019). In 2012 there was an acclaimed documentary, Mccullin, made by Jacqui and David Morris. He has won countless awards for his photography. Last – and also least, in his opinion – he had a meeting with Angelina Jolie, who wanted to make a film about him. (‘She’s a very lovely woman but the script wasn’t very impressive and she kept sending me hampers. I said, stop sending me presents. I don’t expect it to materialise. It’s nonsense really. I don’t need a film about me.’)
He was the first photojournalist to get a CBE, awarded in 1993, and in 2016 he was knighted (he tries to deny it when I ask him, but I see a letter addressed to Sir Don). ‘It’s a funny thing, an honour, as it’s both uncomfortable and pleasing – and I don’t know in which order. “Commander of the British Empire” doesn’t mean anything now. Years ago it would have opened every door in the world for you, but it’s of no consequence now – nobody understands or cares about it. I could actually be taken to task for being part of the British Empire, which we shouldn’t have had anyway.
‘You get a letter asking if you accept – and I thought it was nice in a way; maybe for my kids who I was constantly abandoning to go off to war.’ He pauses. ‘I did abandon them, thinking that my life was much more important than theirs. It was wrong. But they’ve all been very generous and forgiven me.’
Mccullin has been married three times, and has four sons and a daughter. He married his first wife, Christine, in 1960, and they had three children. He was just not there much when they were young, always working. Have you forgiven yourself ? ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Their mother died very young, on my son’s wedding day – so we had a huge thing to get over. And I was
‘I don’t really care if my archive goes up in flames. I’ve had my great joy in photography’
the one in the wrong. That’s another thing that creeps back every night and reminds me.’
He and Christine were no longer together at the time of her death. He had left her in 1982 for Laraine Ashton, a modelling agent, with whom he also has a son.
Mccullin has a poetic way of talking. ‘One of my concerns about life,’ he says, ‘the private thing that goes on in my mind, is that I never stop thinking about my upbringing and education – there’s still a touch of inferiority on my shoulders. I still hark back to the days in Finsbury Park when
I slept in the shirt I went to school in, and that stigma never really leaves you – as much as you try to wash it away, the stain of memory is very strong.’
The exhibition in Rome, he says, will be ‘the end of him’ – by which I think he means that he’s retiring, though I doubt it. (This year he’s been to São Tomé, Ghana, Italy, Turkey, France and back to Italy.) But, he says, he is closing his darkroom, which he both loves and hates – although I suspect he has been saying that for years too. ‘I went in the other day and made some prints and I think I’ve lost the great printing skills I used to have. But I’m just afraid that when I do close it down it would be like losing a child or something.
‘Being in that darkroom for 60 years is like smoking three packs of Woodbines a day – the chemistry is very dangerous. It’s a vile place – I’ve got two enlargers in there and it stinks of acid and history. My legs stiffen up and it’s not been good for my lungs, so I said to myself, what do I have to prove any more? In my print room there’s 10,000 prints, so why do I need to make another print?’
We enter the print room, his pride and joy, where the 10,000 are all in labelled boxes. His favourites are the huge, velvety inkjet prints. He takes out a sublime photograph of a kneeling statue of Venus from the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome, ‘one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done – though I didn’t do it, the man who carved the stone did it – but it’s the thing I love the
‘I left school at 15… I’m embracing a world far beyond my capacity to understand’
most in my whole body of work.’
We go through more prints, Mccullin providing an amusing soundtrack. ‘This was donkey’s years ago,’ he says, of a picture of Francis Bacon. ‘I got thoroughly pissed that day – he kept ordering more wine and then we all went to the Colony Room. And here’s Marcus Aurelius, who killed 20 to 30,000 people; and this was taken in a house in Wiltshire, the emperor something or other.
‘This was done in the Met [in New York] – it’s the young Hercules, they allowed me to go in the early morning before it opened. This was the museum in Istanbul – the light is extraordinary isn’t it? And here’s Claudius tormenting Boadicea – huge tablets of stone. This is a mausoleum built by Hadrian, when his boyfriend drowned in the Nile; here’s some trees on the Appian Way – they always say “Rome” to me; and here is a Lalique vase, worth 2,000 quid. Two Roman ladies here – the genitalia of the males got knocked off…’
What will you do with all of these prints?
‘I don’t know. The other day we had an electrical problem – a fallen tree had damaged a cable – and the whole place could have gone up in flames. Catherine said, I’m very worried about your archive, but I thought, I don’t really care, to be honest. I’ve had my great joy in photography. I’ve had my experience.’
It was his great friend Mark Shand, the writer and conservationist, and brother of Queen Camilla, who introduced Mccullin to Catherine Fairweather, then an editor at Harpers & Queen. ‘We went out one night to a friend’s 50th birthday and I saw this rather glamorous-looking woman with red lipstick and a very low-cut dress – sorry,
I don’t want to sound like Russell Brand now. She was very polite and courteous and said, would you consider working for Harpers & Queen? And I said, oh I’d love to do that – which wasn’t totally true but I was seduced by her good looks.
‘That night I went back to Shand’s flat. He said, she likes you, that girl, I know about these things – I’ll give you her phone number. And that was that – and here we are 21 years later. She’s very elegant and sophisticated – she’s out of my league really.’ They have a 21-yearold son, Max, who is at university in Bristol.
Mccullin and Shand did a lot of travelling together, and he was devastated when Shand died, as a result of falling over and cracking his skull in 2014. Together, they went to the then Prince Charles’s 70th birthday; Mccullin has been to Buckingham Palace a few times. His life is full of contradictions. He tells me about a trip he took on a private jet with Evgeny Lebedev and Jemima Khan, to the Lebedev palazzo in Italy. ‘It was very weird.’ Why did you go? ‘Curiosity. I went because I was
curious and I like being around interesting things. Their palazzo is full of amazing Roman busts and incredible furniture.’
He also went to the Coronation. Did you wear your medals?
‘I didn’t have the miniature versions to wear on my jacket so I had to get them on ebay. I didn’t realise you can wear the full-size one at the ceremony, so I was the only one with miniatures – in a way I was less showing off instead of having a big gong.’ He pauses. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have accepted it, who knows?’
If awards don’t mean much to him, then what does?
‘Respect for my work. All those books – knowing that I haven’t spent years taking risks running across battlefields and isolating myself in that darkroom for nothing.’
For Mccullin, photography is an act of devotion. He does not believe in God. ‘I’m not very big on religion. When you’ve seen 600 dying children in Africa, or men and women massacred in front of you, like I did in Beirut, it’s hard to believe in the Almighty.
‘But whenever I was in trouble, I always used to say, please God get me out of here. So hypocrisy I am really big on, when needed.’
His ‘baptism of war’ was 60 years ago, when he was sent to Cyprus by the Observer Magazine. After that he joined mercenaries in Congo, photographed the Klan in Mississippi, covered famine in Biafra, made 16 trips to Vietnam, and recorded the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He was thrown in jail in Uganda; he went to the siege of Beirut. He went deaf in one ear after a mine blew up next to him in Cambodia, and at various times was shot in the legs, hit by a mortar, and fell off a roof in El Salvador, breaking his arm.
The only wars he regrets not covering are Chechnya, and the Falklands – he was furious when he was refused permission to photograph the latter because all the Navy’s press slots had been filled.
Would he like to have gone to Ukraine? ‘I can’t even walk properly, let alone run, but God I wish I was there,’ he says.
You still think like that?
‘I do, I wish I was there.’ He acknowledges the difference: ‘It’s a drone war, and it’s not like wars I’ve covered before.’
He went back to the front line in Syria in 2012, aged 77. ‘You could say that was rather foolish. I suppose I was kind of like a Hollywood hero who was great when he was young and rather sad when he was old – I was deluding myself really. But I had to do it, I had to get it out of my system. It’s still in the system but it’s fantasy now, not reality.’
In the early days, Mccullin found it all tremendously thrilling. But now he is left with the after effects. ‘All this stuff comes back when I’m lying in bed at night, trying to nod off. I get these flashbacks and they stop me from sleeping. I’m suffering from overcrowdedness upstairs.’ Has it got any better with age? ‘No, because you’re faced with new challenges – like getting old. There’s a place down the road for old people, it’s called The Glen. I’ve told Catherine never to put me in The Glen. I’m not tired of life – I’m just tired of what it’s done to me.’
Have you had therapy for posttraumatic stress?
‘No, no. I always claim that I’ve cured myself by photographing the landscape. Last week Catherine and I were in Turkey, not far from the Iranian border – and we went up this 6,000-foot mountain [by car]. It was freezing bloody cold but I took these beautiful pictures of some amazing figures – they look almost prehistoric. I’m driven by this great passion for archaeology, and I thought, Christ, I can still do this.
‘I left school at 15. No education, no knowledge, nothing – and I’m now embracing a world that’s far beyond my capacity to understand. All I have is these eyes – and they’re good, my eyes, they’re still in there for the fight.’
‘All this stuff comes back when I’m lying in bed… Flashbacks stop me from sleeping’
Even as a child Mccullin 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 tenement in Finsbury Park, with a sister, Marie, and a brother, Michael (who later joined the Foreign Legion). Aged five he was evacuated to a village near Frome in Somerset – his sister went to stay with a wealthy family, and Mccullin to a farm labourer’s house. When Mccullin returned to London after the war, his sister stayed on. ‘My mother gave her away – she was so poor she thought it would be better for her.’ (Now 86, Marie lives in Bristol.)
Frome is not far from where he lives now, and a vision of the countryside stayed with him: ‘I always remembered this lovely village, with a stream and cows and hazelnut trees.’
At 14, Mccullin won a scholarship to Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts, which he couldn’t take up because his father died of chronic asthma the same year, and he had to get a job. After working in the dining cars on the railway, he was employed at an animation studio in Mayfair, followed by national service in the RAF, where he worked as a photographic assistant, processing film from the bombers that came back. He spent
his life savings of £30 on his first camera, a Rolleicord.
It was rough in Finsbury Park, and many of Mccullin’s friends went to prison. He photographed the local gang he used to hang out with, The Guvnors, and when gang culture got into the news, The Observer printed his picture of them, artfully posed in a bombed house, in 1959. In his memoir Unreasonable Behaviour, he 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.’ Photography, he says now, found him.
Mccullin was at The Sunday Times for 18 years, under the unparalleled editorship of the late Harold Evans. ‘He was a special man – a really decent, moral, democratic human being – and nobody could replace him.’ Evans called Mccullin ‘a conscience with a camera. What’s remarkable is his empathy. He’s on the side of humanity.’
As well as covering momentous events abroad, he continued to photograph working-class communuties in London and the North of England. His last major war assignment for the paper’s magazine was in Beirut in 1982. It left him with some appalling memories. Since then he has transferred his miraculous eye to the English landscape; Somerset has been his refuge. However, not for him photographs of blue skies and pastoral idylls. Oh no. Mccullin’s West Country pictures are bleak landscapes of dark skies and winter, full of drama and portent.
Mccullin has some surprising passions. He loves cleaning, for a start. His home is spotless. And ‘I have this terrible love of shoes that I can’t wear – I bought three pairs in New York and haven’t worn them, in case they are uncomfortable.’
He also collects shirts. ‘Upstairs in my lovely French dressing table, I’ve got about 16 new shirts which I’ve never taken out of their wrappers. Most of them are blue, by the way. You’ve got to have something weird about you, don’t you think?’
After ringing National Rail enquiries (Don is old-school), he offers me a lift to the station. En route he bemoans being surrounded by so many fashionable locals, and sure enough we pass Bill Amberg, the luxury leather designer, driving a yellow kit car which looks like he built it himself. Mccullin points out his friend Mariella Frostrup’s house, and insists George Osborne, another neighbour, is a nice person.
When we get to the station, it transpires National Rail enquiries have got it wrong and we are an hour early, so we go for a drive. In Castle Cary Mccullin spots the hairdresser’s. ‘That’s where I get my hair cut. Young girl about 20, she’s no idea who I am and I tell her all these stories and I think she thinks I’m making them up.’ What, you talk about Vietnam? ‘No – I told her I went to the Coronation. I doubt she believed me. She probably said to her mates, you’ll never guess what he came out with today…’
We drive through the country roads, past oak trees and vibrant hedges and lovely golden local stone. This is truly a beautiful part of England. But soon, Mccullin says ominously, ‘we shall come upon something that fills me with dread’. I am intrigued. We round a corner and he brakes sharply. There is a driveway, and a sign: The Glen Care Home.
Life, Death and Everything In Between, by Don Mccullin, is published by GOST Books next month at £80. Don Mccullin in Rome is on display until 28 January at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Mccullin is represented by Hamiltons Gallery, London
‘I told my hairdresser I went to the Coronation. I doubt she believed me’