The political landscape
Don McCullin talks about his latest book
Possibly Britain’s greatest living photographer, Don McCullin is a name that will surely be familiar to most, if not all, AP readers. Best known for his harrowing war and conflict photography, McCullin also has a vast wealth of landscape imagery in his archive.
Earlier this year, AP was lucky enough to attend an exclusive talk between McCullin and Martin Parr to a small audience at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol.
McCullin stumbled into professional photography almost by accident, but grasped the opportunity to carve out a reputation. ‘My father died at the age of 42, and I felt pretty shabby about the way his life had no meaning. I wanted his name, which is my name, to mean something.’ Of course, McCullin would go on to have a long and successful photography career, the fruits of which are to go on display in a major retrospective at the Tate Britain next year.
McCullin is still working today at 83 – photography has turned out to be an enduring love affair. ‘It’s got such a grip on me. Yesterday, I went in my darkroom and I made a few pictures. I thought, my god, I’m still being blackmailed by photography, which is supposed to be somebody I love. It’s supposed to be enjoyable – but in the end it turns out to be a torment.’
A new book, The Landscape, charts McCullin’s fascination with landscape over the past five decades, but it’s fair to say that his interest was especially piqued by his decision to move 35 years ago. ‘I was in a relationship and I got kicked out. Luckily I had a house in Somerset, so I got in my old Rover in Notting Hill Gate and thundered down to Somerset. I opened a huge case of wine from Berry Bros & Rudd and starting smashing myself up, and kicking the furniture around and feeling sorry for myself.
‘When I came through that, I suddenly realised “Why was I being such a fool?” because I was surrounded by the most beautiful countryside in the world. There, in howling blizzards and rain, I suddenly started feeling happy – I felt free and ready to start life all over again.’
For McCullin, photography is clearly very much a form of therapy, an escape from some of the horrors that he’s witnessed. ‘I’ve looked at the most horrible things you can imagine in the world. I’ve looked at men being executed in front of me. So when you’re standing in front of
a naked landscape in Somerset – these things never go away. One bounces off the other.’
Indeed, it could be argued that much of McCullin’s landscape work shares a common theme in that he prefers shooting bleak monochrome winter scenes, especially in the locales close to his home. ‘In the summer I’ll get the sunbed out, because I don’t like the skies. I don’t like leaves. When you see a tree naked – it tells you more. Probably like a human being really – when you see a naked tree without foliage, it’s the real thing.’
It’s not just nearby landscapes that McCullin has photographed. One of his big passions is for Roman architecture. ‘We photographers, we need a project; I thought I’d do something on the Romans.
‘ The trouble is, when I was standing there in the great Roman past glories, you know the people who built these incredible cities would have been crushed by falling stone; they would have been starved in the quarries. So when you’re admiring something of great beauty, you know the price – or you should know the price – of what it cost to put that together.’
It’s easy to assume that shooting landscapes is about as far removed from politics as it’s possible to be for any photographer. McCullin would argue otherwise. ‘I think the landscape is one of the most important things that we can be concerning ourselves with right now. People need homes – and they should have homes. You can’t be holier than thou when it comes to giving a person a roof over their head. Yet, there’s going to be a huge uproar if you start eating into the green belt. Even the Somerset landscape is political. It’s under threat, so I’m recording it, in its glory. I’m making my mark on it.’
It’s with a great sense of irony that McCullin delivers this summation. ‘I started photography because I was bit of a “thicky” when I was young. I left school at 15 and didn’t have an education. I thought photography would be really good because nobody knows you don’t know anything about anything, all you do is go out and take pictures; it’s not political. But – you know something – everything I’ve done in my life has been political, everything I’ve touched.’
As keen as many of us might be to pigeonhole ourselves into a type of photography – war photographer or landscape photographer – McCullin says he is happy to be known simply as ‘a photographer’. It’s obvious too that after all these years, that stranglehold won’t be loosening its grip any time soon.