McCullin

Tonight's Imagine presents an intimate portrait

of the great British war photographer and photojournalist

Don McCullin.

In his early 20s, and with no formal training,

McCullin began his career here in Finsbury Park,

photographing the violent teenage gangs ruling the roost in the 1950s.

He would go on to capture history as it was being made,

bearing witness to the bloodiest conflicts of the last 50 years.

Despite announcing his retirement from the warzone ten years ago,

after returning from Iraq,

McCullin decided to make a trip to Syria late last year.

He wanted to show the human side of the ongoing conflict in Aleppo,

where, not for the first time in his career, he came under sniper fire.

A self-confessed war junkie,

Don McCullin's quest to bring the ugly truths of the war

to international attention would come at great personal cost.

Jacqui and David Morris's often graphic film

lays bare the addiction to danger, and the commitment to justice,

that lie at the heart of this extraordinary life.

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.

War is partly madness, mostly insanity,

and the rest of it is schizophrenia.

You do ask yourself, "Why am I here? What's my purpose?

"What's this got to do with photography?"

And it goes on and on, the questioning.

You're trying to stay alive, you're trying to take pictures,

you're trying to justify your presence there.

And you think, "What good is this going to do anyway?

"These people have already been killed."

There were many battles within my own mind,

before I got to these major conflicts.

And when I got there, I was even more confused.

I try to stay calm.

I try not to indulge myself in this picture-taking.

It was something I was meant to do, but how far was I allowed to take it?

There was a lot of hypocrisy spinning around

inside my own mind at the time.

I didn't really think, um, it was right to be there,

because I sometimes felt that

the people who were doing these terrible things

thought, you know, that I was OK-ing it,

which I certainly wasn't.

The first execution I ever saw in my life

was a dawn execution of a bomber who had killed a load of people

in the Saigon market a few weeks before.

And there were all these photographers and journalists,

they were all on this Jeep, you couldn't get another man on,

and there was nowhere I could see. But I saw the event.

They brought the man, in a Volkswagen truck.

He got out and screamed anti-Americans.

The firing squad shot him.

A man stepped forward, grabbed a turf of his hair,

and shot him through the brains.

And I stood there with my mouth wide open.

And I heard a man saying,

"God, that was great stuff, did you get it, did you get it?"

And I have never forgotten, to this day, and that was in 1965,

and I didn't get it.

And I never said anything about this situation

to the people in the Sunday Times, because they would have thought

I must have been a rank amateur not to have got such a picture.

But, looking back,

did I have the right to take that man's picture of his murder?

Because, in a way, public executions are nothing less than murder.

And I didn't get the picture.

MUSIC AND APPLAUSE

You came from a fairly rough background, didn't you, in London?

It seems an unlikely ambition to have, your first ambition,

to be a painter. Was that regarded as a bit sissy?

Well, yes, it was, because where I live,

you were expected to take on anybody.

You'd never back down from an argument.

I used to get some terrible hidings when I was a boy.

But my father, when he was alive,

he used to let me draw on the kitchen wall.

And I'd actually stick pieces of paper on the wall,

but I went over the edge, so there was always

empty pictures with marvellous edges.

RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER

I lived in a house that was a tenement house,

so we could knock huge nails in the walls and stick things on the walls.

I wouldn't let my kids do it now but...

My art career didn't last very long,

because I got a junior art scholarship,

and my father died and I had to go to work.

MUSIC:
"Move It" by Cliff Richard

# Come on, pretty baby, let's move it and a-groove it

# Well, shake, oh, baby, shake, oh, honey, please don't lose it

# It's rhythm that gets into your heart and soul

# Well, let me tell you, baby, it's called rock'n'roll. #

I took a set of pictures of the boys I grew up with.

They were involved in the killing of a policeman.

They didn't actually kill the policeman,

the rival gang that came from Islington,

they were responsible for that killing.

So, I took the photos to the Observer.

They asked me to do more. I did more.

They published the photos.

They gave me the princely sum of 50.

In those days, 50 from where I came from was like five weeks' wages.

And then, I was, I suppose you could say, I was on the road to photography

which has been a lifelong love affair.

It has been really an amazing experience for me.

Because you've got to remember, I don't have any education,

I couldn't read properly.

I came from a violent background where people were mostly interested

in how well you could fight or steal, or do harm to society.

So, quite honestly, having this amazing door opening, someone saying,

"There's your freedom from ignorance and bigotry and violence."

It was amazing I managed to escape from Finsbury Park.

I've often wondered, how did he get that first memorable,

urban landscape of the lads, the gang,

The Guv'nors, as they were called in East London,

standing in a derelict house?

Perfectly framed by the building,

and seeing right through the building.

It was so emblematic of gang warfare and the roughness of London.

And here we have a picture which is almost beautiful in its composition.

You could say, there is no beauty in what this gang was up to.

But he related, he had a sensitivity.

An empathy is something you can't fake.

This is the bloke I gave a good hiding to.

HE LAUGHS:

He tried to hit me with a brick.

We had all been to a funeral.

One of the little girls had committed suicide,

put her head in a gas oven over some bloke I grew up with.

We came back from the funeral, and he ran past my car

and snapped the wing mirror off.

And he was peeing in this alleyway,

that's when I should really have laid into him, while he was peeing,

because it's difficult to fight back if you're in a situation like that.

Then he picked a brick up, came roaring at me.

Then I managed to get hold of it and reverse the charges.

Wasn't I lucky to have grown up in a period of the '60s, '70s, the '80s,

when it was all happening?

It was as if, like it was carved out for me, really.

I did grasp the nettle,

I didn't just look at it and think, "God, I wish I was there."

I used to say, "I'm going to go there." And I did.

- NEWSREEL:

- Paris in the spring of 1961,

and the time of President Kennedy's visit, was as beautiful as ever.

I was in Paris with my wife, my new wife really,

we'd only been married a few weeks.

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