Comfort in old age for wounds of a war junkie

Don McCullin is arguably the greatest war photographer that ever lived. Film critic Tony Earnshaw on a documentary that looks at his sometimes tormented life.

In the etheral half-light of a new dawn, an old man trudges across a crisp landscape that has yet to feel the full glow of the sun.

The still of the morn is broken by the distant song of birds and the sound of his boots as they compact the frosty earth. Then, like a muted small calibre pistol crack, comes a snap as the shutter fires and an image is captured for all time.

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The countryside of Somerset is what entrances Don McCullin these days. Now 77, the man described as the best war photographer in the world has endured more than his share of blasted terrain, carnage, cruelty and death. He’s earned the right to salve his own wounds – the psychological kind that linger long after the fact.

McCullin has lived two lives. In the first he zig-zagged around the planet, hopping from one conflict to another to deliver appalling picture packages for the Sunday Times Magazine. More recently he has enveloped himself in an ongoing process of exorcism, keenly seeking to wash his soul free of the filth in which he swam for 30-odd years.

By his own admission Don McCullin was a war junkie. Propelled by a drive he could not understand, the 27-year-old Londoner willingly put himself in harm’s way. He sought out the world’s trouble spots and made them his career. But as a new documentary by David Morris and Jacqui Morris illustrates, McCullin reached a point where the adrenalin took over. One war a year became two, then three. He couldn’t keep away. Now, so many years later, the images he caught on film have become memories carved deep into his psyche.

When he speaks about what he describes as “the contamination of his mind” McCullin does so quietly, and with creditable dispassion. His was a life lived with bloated, flyblown corpses in scenes straight out of a horror comic. He saw it all and photographed it all.

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His early experiences included that now iconic shot of a north London gang framed in the fabric of a half demolished house. He knew them all and, had things been different, might have been one of them.

He photographed the Berlin Wall, fascist rallies orchestrated by Oswald Mosley, and Ku Klux Klan rallies in Mississippi. He recorded the grime-encrusted faces of aged derelicts living rough in London. If there was pain, he found it.

His baptism of war was in Cyprus where he witnessed the grisly aftermath of murdered civilians at close range. Later he joined Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare and his British-styled mercenary unit, 5 Commando, in the Congo, disguising himself so as to gain access to Stanleyville in 1964 where Congolese police were running amok. He saw unimaginable atrocities – young men skinned alive – and recorded it all on film and on memory.

Then came Vietnam. Editor Harold Evans sent McCullin to that far-off war in 1968. He saw in this taciturn photographer a willingness to record without interference though not without compassion. Evans calls him “the conscience with a camera”, adding “An empathy is something you can’t fake”.

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During the apocalyptic two-week Battle of Hue – fought in the chaotic aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968 – McCullin embarked on what he calls “a journey into total madness and insanity”. Free of the restrictions of modern “embedding” he charged around the war zone with complete abandon. What he saw there haunts him still.

Living and working within a unit of US Marines, McCullin went native. It truly was a descent into the heart of darkness. Death was all around. It visited McCullin every day and, famously, touched him when a stray bullet hit the camera slung around his neck.

His proximity to the Marines and their enemy ensured the Sunday Times enjoyed one of its classic photojournalistic spreads. The key image from that trip still resonates today. It is a timeless black and white portrait of a shell-shocked American soldier, deadened eyes wide, blank and staring, lost in his own private perdition. McCullin took several frames. Never once did his subject object or blink. He never knew.

It was during this period that McCullin’s need for the buzz of combat became most acute. The documentary addresses questions of his motivations, the conflicted nature of his work – our vicarious experience of war via his unflinching third eye – and what appears to be a position of non-involvement in what he records.

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Yet as the years wore on McCullin began to resent what he had once sought. By his own admission he looked forward to his wars. He was unsentimental. Visiting Biafra and seeing human suffering on a Biblical scale changed his mind forever.

McCullin was the north London kid with no education who had found a vocation and pursued it. But in acquiring a living legend status en route 
to his own personal destination, he began rejecting the laurels he was handed. “I am neither an artist nor a poet,” he says. “I am a photographer.”

In seeking status as a war photographer, he came to detest the label. To him it is a tag that hints at the occupation of those wandering killers he met with Mike Hoare almost half a century ago.

In his dotage McCullin lives a quiet life. He knows he is fortunate to have retained his life and his sanity.

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Yet he is plagued by daytime nightmares. Visions from the past – the dead, the dying, the helpless, men about to be executed, their eyes imploring him to act – give him the feeling of drowning. It has been an extraordinary life.And so he injects the winter landscape of Somerset with light, forever seeking to purge the darkness that is still within him.

First among the honoured

Don McCullin has been at the heart of several wars and conflicts. They include Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Biafra, and the Lebanon.

For years he believed pressure from the Thatcher government prevented him covering the Falklands War in 1982. Only later did it emerge that the Royal Navy had used up its quota of Press passes.

His books include The Palestinians, Beirut: A City in Crisis, Don McCullin in Africa, and Shaped by War.

He was awarded the CBE in 1993, the first photojournalist to be recognised with the honour.

McCullin (15) is showing in Yorkshire at cinemas including the National Media Museum and Sheffield Showroom.

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