Exhibition: Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, February 6 – June 13 2010
Through a 51-year stint at the frontline of combat which made most war journalists look like fashion correspondents, Don McCullin gained reverential status.
He won the World Press Photo Award and the Warsaw Gold Medal as far back as 1964, became the first photojournalist to win a CBE in 1993 and had honorary doctorates and degrees from at least three universities at the last count.
He's best symbolised by the simple shot of the Nikon camera which blocked a bullet for him in Cambodia in 1968, but the life story of this "product of Hitler" – "I was born in the thirties and bombed in the forties", he explains – is almost as compelling as his images.
A US Marine in Hue, Vietnam (1968)
McCullin grew up in a Finsbury setting bearing little relation to the high-brow perception of the area today, raised without an education in an impoverished household surrounded by violence and bigotry.
In a suitably bloody start to the turbulence he would spend decades capturing, his escape from what he calls "the very worst possible start to life" came when he sent photos of a policeman being stabbed to death during a gang dispute at the bottom of his road to The Observer.
"The picture editor was in a swivel chair, and he kept swivelling round. He looked at me and said 'I’m going to ask you a question.' And I said 'well, carry on.'
"He said 'did you take this photograph?' And I said, 'yeah, of course I did.' And he said, 'would you like to do some more for us?' And I said I would, so I went off and took a few more."
Two US soldiers on high alert observe from an upper storey window by the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie (1961)
Shaped by War illustrates the single-mindedness and news instinct McCullin rapidly developed after that.
He paid his own way to visit Cold War Germany when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, earning awards and a part-time contract at The Observer for his trouble.
"I suddenly thought to myself, 'for once in your life, you have a purpose,'" he reflects. "'You could turn the minds of certain people and situations.'"
Ethiopian family with an AK-47 rifle, Mo Valley, Ethiopia (2002)
Despite arguing that he never wanted to be labelled a war photographer, he was sent to military campaigns in successive years, starting an 18-year spell at The Sunday Times Magazine shortly before a spell in Vietnam covering the Tet Offensive of 1968.
Exposed to continuous sniper fire, McCullin suffered combat stress in pursuit of some of the most important conflict images ever taken.
"I knew I was slightly insane on the helicopter back, but I had 28 rolls of the most powerful film," he says.
This image from Cyprus was named the World Press Photo of the Year in 1964
Worse was to come – in Biafra, a year later, he watched hundreds of children die in a school complex, and his portraits of Bangladeshi civilians devastated by disease in 1971 drew a strong response from the British public.
"It was one of the most shocking things I’ve ever seen," he says of Biafra. Bangladesh made him juggle "amazing pictures" with the realisation that his was "a terrible way of earning a living".
In Northern Ireland he was targeted by both sides of a civil war, and he narrowly avoided execution in the Middle East and death after being struck by a mortar shell in Cambodia.
McCullin running from British armoured car in the Bogside, Londonderry (1972). © Clive Limpkin
By the 1980s, he admits, he’d become "a war junkie", his reputation preceding him. Conversely, The Times was giving less space to his style of work under Rupert Murdoch's ownership, and he was sacked in 1983 after publicly criticising his bosses.
"I suspect I was suffering a kind of mental breakdown," he reveals.
"I was slightly sick of hanging around The Sunday Times with the safari jacket on but no safari to go to."
As he approaches his 75th birthday in October, McCullin says his landscapes have helped him find peace. © IWM
Something had to give and, apart from brief returns to the genre for the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 and a highly emotive contemplation of the Aids epidemic in Africa in 2000, it is McCullin's switch to landscapes which has allowed him to find peace as he reaches 75.
"My landscapes have become a form of meditation," he concludes.
"They’ve actually healed a lot of my pain, my guilt from the things I’ve seen."
Continues to Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, September 11 – November 21 2010; Imperial War Museum, London, October 7 2011 – January 30 2012.
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