PHOTO LEGENDS

Every month we bring you interviews and portfolios from the world’s top image makers – aswell as retrospectives from the very best names in the history of photography Don McCullin To mark the 80th birthday of legendary photojournalist Don McCullin, his

If you hadn’t become a photographer, what would you have been?

“That’s an impossible question to answer because way back in those days, I had no trade. I worked in a small darkroom in Mayfair copying line drawings, but that would have been the death of me had my life not turned out the way it has. I’ve travelled continuously around the world, and to the most extraordinary events. When I was young, I wasn’t educated enough and I wasn’t aware like the way I became aware once I started travelling. They say, ‘Travel broadens the mind’.”

Have any photographers inspired you?

“Previous great photographers like Eugene Smith, Stieglitz, Steichen and Lartigue – a whole list of names. They’re men of the distant past, and they’re men who have shaped my love of photography in a classical way; not so much the way I’ve turned out to be in photographing war. But I’ve arrested that war stuff, and in my own spare time, in between assignments for The

Sunday Times, I went and did landscape and foreign travel, which I paid for. I went to places like Irian Jaya and parts of Africa. The previous giants in photography helped to shape my life.”

Which assignment was the most memorable of your career?

“The most important one was the Tet Offensive in 1968 in Vietnam, because it was on such a major scale. The battle I was in went on for two solid weeks, during which I could see a really powerful image in any direction I turned. It was as if somebody had laid it on for me totally, which is not true, of course.”

You’ve said that you’ve had a love affair with photography?

“A love affair means total dedication. It was as if I was almost like a kind of alcoholic – it was the same attachment. Photography made me a totally dedicated martyr and follower; therefore I would never cut corners in my darkroom or in the field where I was working in terrible places: in Beirut, terrible famines in Africa. I would wait, be patient and be very respectful and

Sebastião _ Salgado _ Profile

Don McCullin CBE was born in London in October 1935. After one of his pictures was published in The Observer newspaper in 1959 he went on to build an outstanding career as a photojournalist, mainly covering conflict, primarily for The Sunday Times...