Abstract
In the 1980s the tiny, lushly beautiful country of El Salvador in Central America was riddled with corruption, massacres and ubiquitous “death squads”. There were no good guys on either the right or the left in the squalid little civil war. Naturally this hopelessly benighted land filled up with foreign correspondents. I happened to be there at the same time as the great war photographer Don McCullin, then working for The Sunday Times.
On mortared roads, in burnt-out villages, in bomb-shattered markets I've encountered many of his kind. But Salvador was the first time that I realised how particularly dangerous it is to have to use a camera as the main tool of your trade. Mass murderers are somewhat averse to having their crimes recorded on film. And so it proved in McCullin's case; in Salvador he was badly wounded and barely survived.
Why do people like him keep on volunteering for this job, risking their lives, neglecting their children, damaging their marriages? One reason is, over time, they become “war junkies”, as he ruefully acknowledges. They only feel alive if their veins are full of adrenalin as the bullets fly and they escape death yet again.
McCullin has recently published an updated and expanded autobiography called Unreasonable Behaviour, with the help of the veteran investigative reporter Lewis Chester.
I suspect, perhaps unfairly, that Chester's contribution was crucial. McCullin is dyslexic, was barely educated in the slum school he attended in the then poor and gang-ridden Finsbury Park in north London and, despite his CBE and innumerable international awards, he has always felt looked down on by people who went to university.
When some long-gone editor once opined that his pictures were mundane, he assumed he was being praised; he was crestfallen when he found out what it meant. If ever he felt he was being perceived as a “mere snapper”, he could be touchy: if a reporter colleague proprietorially referred to him as “my photographer”, McCullin predictably seethed. No wonder he preferred to work alone.
Thanks to his detailed photographic memory and intense emotional recall, he's produced a brilliant page-turner – exciting, gut-wrenching and occasionally leavened with moments of farce. He's worked in Vietnam, Biafra, Beirut, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, the Congo, South Africa … there's hardly any war that hasn't had McCullin as an anguished witness.
When he misses a war (like the Falklands, from which the British government in effect banned him), he is almost melodramatically stricken: “I'd spilt blood in Salvador, I'd spilt blood in Cambodia, but when it came to my own country, my blood wasn't good enough for them. I would rather have bled for England, bled in the Falklands, along with my own army. But that army was denied me.
‘It was a point of honour. I felt dishonoured by my own country I sat awake at nights, a man of 46, in tears. I was boozed up and tearful when the bulletins and dispatches started coming back from the Falklands.”
Despite his addiction to it, he knows war is bad for you, even if you survive, which many of his colleagues didn't. He has survivor's guilt and has been close to a nervous breakdown. He has been offered, and refused, counselling, but now finds solace in photographing the landscape of Somerset, where he lives with his third wife and child, the youngest of his five children by three different women.
The pictures are far from chocolate-box. He shoots in stark black, grey and white, mostly in winter; the pictures are beautiful, but oddly disturbing, even threatening.
At 80, he is still devastatingly attractive: rugged cheeks, intense blue eyes, thick hair, a hint of vulnerability No wonder so many beautiful women fell in love with him and he with them. His first wife Christine, to whom he was married for 22 years, was the mother of three of his children. He left her for Laraine, a leggy model-agency boss from the world of fashion.
Although he broke the longsuffering Christine's heart, they remained close, and he regards his abandonment of her as “unforgiveable”; his long description of her dying from a brain tumour at a mere 48 is almost too painful to read. He and Laraine never married and eventually grew apart.
He seems most at ease wrapped in the magical womb of a darkroom; it's where he learned about photography during national service in the RAF. Unable to understand or complete the written form to join the photography section of the air force, he was pushed off into a darkroom job. War didn't kill him, but eventually the darkroom might. He's had a stroke and a heart bypass, and blames some of his ill health on decades of breathing in photographic chemicals.
Although these days there is never any shortage of war, newspapers, magazines and their readers seem to have lost the appetite for seeing it, or its anonymous victims, in print. This angers McCullin, but perhaps he has supped on the world's horrors long enough. One hopes his happy third marriage, and rural Somerset, will continue to administer balm to this agonised soul.