This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2025 concern of AnOther Magazine:
“One of the first photographs I ever took was The Guvnors, a picture of a gang of boys I went to school with. It was off-the-cuff, a Sunday in 1958. They said, ‘Listen, why don’t you go and get that camera, take a picture of us?’ I belted up to the house, brought the camera down – but I didn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm. They all had suits on, it was sunny. I took one frame and that negative is still great today. When they went on to become implicated in the murder of a policeman, The Observer asked to publish the image and suddenly I was a photographer – that picture was the first page of my working life, though I’ve always felt photography chose me. Not long afterwards, I was sitting in Café de Flore in Paris with my first wife and I looked over her shoulder and saw a newspaper picture of an East German soldier jumping over the wire into the West with his Kalashnikov and helmet. I knew I needed to go to Berlin. My life has been blessed by making the right decision at the right time – I was on that wonderful conveyor belt going in the right direction. My eyes were always open – for some reason they were hungry eyes that were constantly looking for information, events, happenings. I was alive. I had a camera, these eyes and I had a quest. I could see better than anybody else. It was a great gift, whoever gave me this gift. Though nothing I’ve done in my life has ever done any good.”
Don McCullin, probably the most influential conflict photographer of our time, is 90 this autumn – an occasion that coincides along with his new present, A Desecrated Serenity, at Hauser & Wirth, New York. For McCullin, the milestone birthday will not be a jubilant second: “There’s nothing to celebrate about being one of the lucky chosen. I’m just going to say thankfully, quietly, how lucky I am. I don’t feel great about outliving other people.” Coming from Finsbury Park and “all the worst possible ingredients of background – racism, violence, bigotry, ignorance”, McCullin went on to danger his life (wounded in Cambodia, cerebral malaria in West Africa, imprisonment by Idi Amin in Uganda), bringing the realities of conflict to British breakfast tables for almost 20 years below Harold Evans at The Sunday Times. He documented the Vietnam and Biafra wars, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Lebanese Civil War and the autumn of Phnom Penh, amongst many different conflicts.
Violence and ache have adopted McCullin, even haunting him from the barbarous beginnings of the Roman marble sculptures he now likes to seize – many examples of which will probably be juxtaposed (alongside luminous platinum prints of floral nonetheless lifes and landscapes) along with his earlier conflict photos in his forthcoming present. He’s most happy with these calm and meditative works. “What I’m trying to do is run away from my war past, trying to clean up my act – I think it will exonerate my worrying. It will show that I don’t just rely on the suffering of others. I’ve never been more strong in my sentiments that my work has been a passing effort – look at Gaza. But I thought it was only right to show there was more in me than just looking at other people’s loss. At night, when I go to bed, if I’m lying on my own my past comes rushing back.”
This story options within the Autumn/Winter 2025 concern of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now.
Don McCullin A Desecrated Serenity is at Hauser & Wirth New York till 8 November.