Don McCullin in conversation with Paul Herrmann – Transcript

Participants
PH = Paul Herrmann, Interviewer
DM = Don McCullin, Interviewee

Recording starts

PH: Hi, I’m Paul Herrmann from Redeye, the photography network and I’m very pleased to be here with Don McCullin at the Imperial War Museum North to talk about his exhibition, Shaped By War, which is just opening. So, Don, tell us what is the purpose of the war photograph?

DM: I think purely to convey to the viewer a situation that they’re not in a position to be involved in, because they’re separated by possibly thousands of miles of distance. So you go to war, you take a photograph, you bring it back and you hope that you’re going to somehow enlighten the viewer about something he or she knows nothing about. There would be no point in me going to these places and bringing these images back if there was no purpose to it, really. It was to show people what was going on and how awful and wrong it was.

PH: So the exhibition’s called Shaped By War and you’re shaped by war, the people you show, the subjects, are obviously shaped by war, the audience, the rest of the world are obviously shaped by wars; so that’s presumably the implication of the title. Do you want to talk, first of all, about yourself and what effect all of this has had on you as a person?

DM: Well, I’ve talked about myself quite a bit over the years but it has had an effect on me, but I’m trying not to keep going on about it. But, at the same time, you can’t do all this work and show all this tragedy and suffering without it being locked into my mind for the rest of my life. It’s one of those bits of baggage I’m going to have to carry around, even if it does hurt my shoulders, but that’s not for me to go on about. The fact is I chose to do this, so I can’t blame anybody else. I did it willingly and not reluctantly, so I have myself to blame.
But, on the other hand, I’m generally satisfied that I saw it through and I never dropped the standards of what I was trying to do. I wanted my photos to get to you and I wanted you to see them and I wanted you to have an opinion and be moved by it. Because I was always with soldiers and aligned to soldiers, I didn’t realise I was doing the wrong thing. I was harping too much on the glory of the battlefield when all the time the people who were picking up the real price of war were the civilians. And once I got my head around that, I realised then that this was the direction I had to take the pictures of war I was taking. I had to be about the civilian suffering because they are always the last people to be told it was coming to them.

PH: The quote that opens the exhibition where you talk about ‘you have to feel in order to take these pictures,’ I think that’s just spot on. Looking and thinking about your work for ages, I suppose what you’ve got is a kind of level of empathy and a level of communication, both with your subject and with us the audience, that is still very, very rare I think. Not many photographers will talk in the way that you do about their experiences.

DM: I almost feel that because I have to talk so much about my pictures, that there’s a slight defeatist kind of element in the fact that these pictures should be talking for themselves. But, of course, what people really like to do is to have identification, they need extra kind of supplements of what’s going on?; why is it going on?; where is it? what was the purpose of it? So since my pictures can’t talk in a verbal way, they talk in a visual sense, I was always under the impression that I could have been the voice of these people in my images, because people when they’re injured and shocked, they sometimes are shocked into silence.

PH: Can you talk about perhaps what goes through your mind when you’re coming up to a checkpoint or when you’re about to get in trouble, or something like that? I mean how does it work for you, because you’ve obviously got a rare gift. And I was thinking, there’s a quote in the Magnum book about Peter Marlow, who I think said he worked with you and another photographer and realised at that point, that he’d rather dive into a hole than take part in any way, but you obviously had your wits about you. How did that work? What was going through your mind?

DM: Well, I thought really after a while, once I started getting my work published, and it was becoming understood – not so much accepted but understood was more important – I started believing that I was the person who could do that work the best.

PH: And I think also lots of photographers say they’re influenced by you. I was influenced by you to go into this.

DM: They’re not the people I want. I don’t want photographers admiring just my work because of the photography. I think it has very little to do with what I was trying to stand for, really.

PH: Yeah, but not admiring your work as photography but interested in the way you work and what you’re trying to do. Simon Norfolk says something like ‘even though we know we’ll never change the world, we should still act as though we might do.’ So a lot of people still are idealistic and ambitious in that sense, do you think?

DM: I think they are. I mean, why not have hope. One just can’t write it all off as if there’s no chance and no hope. You have to have hope.

PH: Looking at Iran with everybody sending their mobile phone images through Twitter and so on, it’s not necessarily a good model for portraying a war in any way but, on the other hand, it’s interesting that people are getting involved, doing their own thing. What do you think when you look at all that explosion of amateur photography in quite difficult, dangerous situations?

DM: It’s a very good question because I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know whether it has any relevance or whether it’s meant to help things along. I think the trouble now is that we’re all photographers, we’re all artists – not me personally, that’s the one thing I disown.

PH: Looking at the works you’ve created as well, I was struck that you’ve got quite a lot of colour photographs here, where it feels more random. The whole experience of looking at them feels slightly more contingent, whereas the black and white pictures, you are almost not exactly constructing images but they’re structured.

DM: Well, they’re controlled.

PH: Yeah.

DM: We don’t live in a black and white world but I’ve chosen to use a black and white medium because it actually has the power, that I can actually increase in the darkroom if need be. I print dark, I print forcefully. This was what once was me, what I did. It’s water under the bridge. I do something else now but sadly, I still print very darkly and I’m more interested in landscape now. I’m trying to cleanse myself of the last fifty years of my history in photography. And by the way, photography only plays a small part in some respects in what I did. This wasn’t about photography, it was about other people’s lives. They’re here because I want other people to see them. I want them to have a longer life than just being trapped in boxes in my house. I took these pictures as a form of communication, I don’t want them to be living in a darkness inside yellow boxes where I live.
PH: Thanks very much, Don.

Recording ends 7:50