Don McCullin's images of war are some of the most riveting and moving ever taken

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 10:36

THROUGH the windows of Don McCullin's car, the cold, stark beauty of Somerset in January flashes by as we speed from the station to his house, the grey light pierced by thin, watery sunshine.

There is something almost poignant about his kind insistence on picking me up: this man who always found his own way – at times crawling on his belly with his camera and his mouth full of mud – to the front line of the major wars of the last 50 years, who was beaten, imprisoned and wounded as he produced the cream of war photography, will not hear of his guest suffering the inconvenience of a seven-mile taxi ride in either direction.

Winding through country lanes and honey stone villages, he says he read the article about his photographer friend Lord Snowdon that I sent when requesting the interview. I smile, awaiting his response.

McCullin recognised the old rascal. So much so he thought, I need to be careful of this interview. Yes, I think, watching the landscape unfurl, but you said yes. Inevitably. McCullin can't back away from challenge. Delicious defiance. When we reach his lovely old stone house, he puts the kettle on and turns his very blue eyes on me. "I can take any question you throw at me."

There is a vase of white lilies in the kitchen. "I hate the smell," McCullin says. Lilies remind him of death. Not that he ever flinched from that either. Death has been his life's business. He used to say he wanted to "break the hearts and spirits of secure people" with his images.

Now he thinks that was getting carried away with himself but his pictures did stain the viewer. You couldn't rub them out. The haunted eyes of a shell-shocked soldier in Vietnam. Civilian corpses in pools of blood in Cyprus. The shrivelled breasts of nursing mothers and the swollen bellies of starving children in the Biafran conflict.

In 1964 he won the World Press Photo Award for a photograph of a woman whose husband had just been killed. Her face captures not just the grief but the fear and hysteria of bereavement.

But it's her son's outstretched hand that completes the story, taking it to another level. A child's desperate hand seeking both reassurance and to reassure.

A major exhibition of McCullin's work opens this weekend at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, with an accompanying book of his remarkable images, Shaped by War, being published.

He's 75 now, though when his car had swept into the station it was somehow reassuring that he looked almost unchanged from photographs of 20 years ago. Handsome in a craggy, lugubrious kind of way.

He's a cynic and a pessimist and something of that has translated physically: the slightly downturned mouth and the eyes that seem full and heavy. His conversation feels almost as if there's too much to say to make it possible. He apologises for lack of clarity. "There is a lot of confusion in this person. I am a bit of a contradiction in many ways."

He always struggled morally with his work, still disapproves of pride. "I don't like the comfort of satisfaction because I know that I trespassed on these people's lives when I was the last person they needed. They needed food long before they needed some Nikon camera leaning over them." Why keep going back then?

"Because I thought I did it well, in a compassionate way that could persuade people to understand the images that I came up with instead of rejecting them outright. If you look at some of my pictures, you will see the victims looking at me in an almost tender way."

But that wasn't all. There was the addiction. Maybe you are never more alive than when you are dodging death. War was exciting unless you were covered with your own blood and brains. "It's an excitement that is an over-indulgence. Your kicks are coming from someone else's downfall. There's no other nicer way of putting it really."

McCullin has seen behaviour that made him question what it is to be human. "Christians" unloading a magazine into their victim's face until only part of a skull remained.

Piles of bodies set alight with kerosene until the flesh melted into the consistency of cake mix. Occasionally, he helped save lives but mostly, he could only witness. He even had to remain helpless while men were executed in front of him. "These are the worst memories I have of war," he says, "when these men's eyes come and visit me at night when I am asleep."

All of this, he survived. It was the wars in his private life that came closest to destroying him.

McCullin grew up in Finsbury Park, then a poor area of north London, during the war.

As a child, he gathered shrapnel in the early mornings to swap in the playground and was evacuated several times, always unhappily. (He was beaten and deprived of baths for over four months before begging to come home.)

But even when the war ended, violence didn't stop in Finsbury Park. His first professional photographs were stylish portraits of a local gang in a derelict house. When a policeman was killed in his street, McCullin sold the pictures and a career was born.

He and his brother Michael, who joined the French Foreign Legion, were used to violence. Their friends got slashed with Stanley knives and one even had his nose cut off.

"There was blood and flesh everywhere. I was ready to go to war and had these credentials that taught me about human suffering. Psychological suffering too, before the blood started flowing."

We're sitting at the kitchen table, in the shadow of the lilies, with tea. I tell McCullin that in an interview with Martin McGuinness, he described the impact of seeing his first dead body and how that shaped his attitude to war. Did McCullin's first body have that effect? "More than you can imagine because it was my father.

I can remember still the smell of the French polish on the coffin on the front room table. My father… I used to peek in and see and it was awful, the candle burning… the smell…" His father was a chronic asthmatic who weighed only seven stone when he died at the age of 40.

The family of five lived in two small, damp rooms and McCullin used to steal coal from the local yard near the station to keep his father warm, climbing over the fence and stumbling over the occasional dead cat disposed of by locals. "My dad couldn't walk more than 20 yards and his weakness was my strength really.

I made myself strong. When you saw him, what he went through, and he never complained. He sat bolt upright every night because he couldn't lie down or he would have suffocated. I used to watch him dying, every year of my life, and I thought, Christ, this is too much. His death made me what I am really."

It also made him an atheist, though when his life was threatened he always prayed instinctively. "Old hypocrite I am," he says. But his father's death prompted anger. "I was really pissed off and I thought, someone's going to pay for this, starting off with Jesus Christ.

That's the way I saw it. It was that chippy old north London thickie who hadn't had an education. There was never a book to read in my house. There was no time for that and I couldn't read properly anyway." (He was dyslexic.) He felt a sense of abandonment? "A sense of liberty taking really. I thought, God has been taking liberties."

Maybe that made him reckless? "It gave me a sense of purpose not recklessness. I felt as if I was indestructible when I was young because I could run very fast." He used to race the Finsbury Park buses, overtaking them even after giving them a start.

He recalls once lying on the ground in a war zone, cheating death when a bullet hit his camera which was lying over his face. Afterwards, he ran, zigzagging, across the hills. "I could hear the shells coming over my head and exploding about me and I felt like… up yours… like I was really stupid and cheeky."

Why was that feeling connected to his father? "Because his death was ill-timed. It was a terrible tragedy that I lost my father who I loved. I tried to make society take note of us as a family. That's what I like about my name. It's his name. So if I get published and my name is under my pictures, I feel as if I am honouring his name."

His father had been a mellow man but his mother was aggressive. They had violent arguments because his father gambled.

"When the old lady hit you, you knew what time of day it was because she had these huge muscles." She drove McCullin crazy and he has spent most of his life trying to deny how like her he is. "When I was about 17 she tried to hit me and I got hold of her and pinned her against the wall and said, 'Those days are over'. She got even more angry because I was pinning her back and she couldn't get at me."

She died when she was 79 and he just missed her death. When he reached the hospital, the nurse said: "She's gone," as if his mother had popped out for shopping, and he and his sister almost laughed at the black humour of it. "They led us into this room and I saw the old lady lying there.

They had taken her false teeth out and she looked like something you would have dug up in one of those Peruvian Inca tombs, something that has been there for thousands of years. This little old lady. And I thought, this is the woman who used to knock the life out of me."

Women have been important in his life. Photographer David Bailey once noted that not only did women mother McCullin, they felt inclined to sleep with him in case he popped his clogs the next week.

He married his teenage sweetheart Christine, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, and they stayed together for 22 years. But then he had an affair with Laraine Ashton, a voluptuous blonde model agency boss, and left.

"It was heartbreaking to leave that night with my son Alexander weeping and my daughter Jess… I drove down the road towards London thinking, you bastard. How can you do this?"

So what was the answer – how could he? "Because I saw this woman who I had never seen the like of. She was very vivacious and blonde and big bosoms, a mane of wild hair, beautiful body… I loved it. I absolutely loved it." Noticeable he says he loved "it", the excitement and the glamour. Not, I loved her. And Christine?

"I was always in love with her, even when I left her. You can do that, you know. You can love another woman at the same time. They may be different values. The love I had with Christine… she bore me three children. You can't ignore that if you are a true, passionate human being."

After he left, Christine was diagnosed with a brain tumour. McCullin was drawn back to see her. "She was sitting there with that same stare I suffer from, the thousand-yard stare. She'd had her tumour removed and was waiting for death to knock on the door."

Their son came back from Australia to get married and Christine hung on. On the morning of the wedding, McCullin was sleeping on the hall floor in her small house. It was a particularly hot summer and he woke to the sound of the electric fan whirring upstairs. He ran up.

Christine was sitting in bed. "I knew it was all over. I put my arm round her and she was warm at the back and cold at the front and that was that. End of story."

She was only 48. He looked at her and thought how beautiful she was, how so many women would want to look like her. "There was barely a wrinkle. She had the perfect nose and the perfect lips." He drove down to his Somerset house with his children.

"I kept looking in the rear-view mirror at them and it was the most bloody awful car ride of my life." He was used to surviving while people died around him. But he wondered why he, the betrayer, escaped while Christine died. His grief was intensified by guilt? "Oh, guilt… there's no name for guilt as big as it was that day. I who thought I was so tough… so indestructible… that day I thought to myself, this is the one war you lost."

There was always incredible drama in McCullin's pictures. Whole stories in one image. They were brimful of emotion yet never sentimental. Looking at his photographs often made you despair yet they somehow captured what it was to be human, in the way Munch's Scream does.

You could never erase the awfulness but neither could you erase the humanity. So while his explanation of simply being blown away by another woman might make sense from some people, in his case I am curious to know more.

How did he shut out his own crying children and leave them when he always felt so impotent and guilty in the face of other people's? Did war make him harder, too used to compartmentalising emotion? Did it make him feel life was short? Did it affect his behaviour? "No, I don't think so."

Interesting the way he rejects ready-made excuses, is uncompromising about his own motives. He describes leaving Christine as the "wickedest" thing he's ever done. One of McCullin's most haunting pictures is of a Biafran albino, a little boy both shunned and starving.

McCullin once described trying to stem his emotions as the boy edged closer to him. "Don't look, don't look," he told himself, before finally pressing a barley sugar surreptitiously into the child's hands.

There's a striking similarity between that and the way he describes shutting out his family as he drove away. Empathising with pain doesn't stop you dishing it out yourself. Does he regret leaving Christine? "I regret betraying her, if we can put it in another context.

"Let's be honest. I started looking at other women. It's a thing about men." He sounds almost apologetic. "We can't help it. I'm sorry to say I still do it and I'm 75 years old.

I still do it. I think, can I get them to look back and, of course, they don't now because they think, here's this old fart coming up the road. Better get out of the way in case he falls over." He laughs. "I do have a sense of irony about it."

His relationship with Laraine, with whom he had a son, Claude, ended. Perhaps Laraine knew she'd lost him, even though Christine was dead. McCullin remembers his daughter ringing him about Christine's illness, asking him to come over.

"I'm going," McCullin said. "You can't," Laraine replied. "I'm going," he repeated. And went. After Christine died, Laraine threw him out. So he took up with one of her models instead. Revenge? No, she just came on to him at a party. It lasted three years but he refused to marry her and they split. Then he took up with a beautiful but crazy American photographer with whom he spent ten years.

Unfortunately he married her after five, he says, so she cleaned him out financially when he left her.

She was something else, he says. "I was sitting in her house once in upstate New York when she came over and went POW! She split my eye open and I had this piece of flesh hanging down so I tried to cut it off with a razor blade but it was too painful so I went to the doctor and for a 100 bucks he cut it off with scissors."

He tells this story with little more drama than he would describe flicking a light switch. Why did she do it? "Because I said I felt like a stranger in her house. You know those relationships that are too hot, too passionate, too angry, too this, too that? You know those relationships?"

Eventually, he left her and burnt anything he had of hers. "You have to eradicate people," he says, which is such an extreme thing to say that you wonder if war affected his behaviour more than he thinks.

He's happily married now to third wife Catherine, a journalist with Harper's Bazaar. "She's very beautiful," he says, bringing out a photograph. She is. The man constantly confronted by ugliness in his career always chose beautiful women.

But for years now he has been a landscape photographer and is about to publish a lavish new pictorial exploration of the lands of the Roman Empire, in his trademark black and white, which he believes to be among his best work ever. His life is different now.

His days start with Max, the little seven-year-old son he has with Catherine, climbing into bed and kissing him.

Back to the station, pressed for time. Flashing images of scrubbed land and watercolour skies. Thin sunshine still. Too much, in fact, for McCullin to photograph today; he prefers his landscapes gloomier. Is he happy?

"Yes," he says, "though at 75 I'm staring into the crater." He's had a recent minor stroke and has heart problems. Thankfully, he's a survivor, I think, looking out of the window. In every way. He's survived both the bullets and the ghosts. The dead men's eyes visit his dreams less often, though you suspect part of McCullin will always be haunted.

And if he hadn't been a war photographer? "I think I'd have been a very sad person." Hasn't he got that wrong? Wouldn't he be less gloomy, less troubled, less pessimistic? "Are you kidding?" he says swinging the car round. A boy from Finsbury Park? "I wouldn't have had any achievement and I wouldn't have brought respectability to my father's name."

Shaped By War is published by Jonathan Cape (25) and Southern Frontiers (50) on 4 March. The exhibition at the Imperial War Museum North (0161-836 4000) runs until 13 June

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010