McCullin Page #6

They don't have the Mercedes-Benz to get away.

They don't have the communication or the money to move off quick.

They are always the very poorest people who get clobbered.

And the amazing thing is that is where I started in my life,

living with poor people,

and when I am with them in those circumstances,

I have a very close affinity and understanding of what their lot is.

# I presume you never noticed

# How much I really cared... #

You are friends, aren't you?

- You are buddies, aren't you?

- Well, we're all buddies.

Can you look where my elbow is?

I want to see your face, if you don't mind. That's fine.

You're OK, aren't you? You don't mind? You don't mind me?

I'm not bullying you around, am I? OK, thanks.

I don't want to take liberties, you know.

I could have spent the rest of my life working

in Aldgate and Whitechapel, it's all there.

Photographically, it's all there.

It is a totally, what do they call it...

..Hogarthian kind of experience, when you are doing these pictures.

PIANO MUSIC:

This is one of my favourite pictures and I've never,

ever printed it before.

Look at these men's hands.

They are all standing up asleep, these men.

These people used to try and put the dead eye on you.

By that, they would try to stare you out.

You must never flinch away like that. You must stare them out.

This is a woman called Jean.

She used to hang out under the arches of Liverpool Street Station.

She used to curtsey when I went up.

She used to say, "Hello, Captain Mark."

I said, "Why do you keep calling me Captain Mark?"

And she said, "Because you look like Captain Mark Phillips."

She said, "Would you like some tea?"

And I said, "You haven't got any milk."

She said, "I can always get it outside of people's front doors."

I loved her.

In fact, what I did, I found her somewhere to live.

This is a picture I really like.

It's like a fallen woman from the turn of the century.

I did this in Chapel Market on Sunday morning when I was very young.

She's been a posh woman, this woman.

You can tell by the handbag, tell by the clothes.

They're all young, now. They are not old people like this.

I think one of the best portraits I ever did

was this man in Spitalfields Market.

He was actually lying by the embers of an all-night fire

that these homeless men used to congregate around.

He sat up and looked at me full-face.

I just held his stare and I just brought my Nikon camera up

to my eye and took this picture and he never moved an eyelid.

I was looking at the bluest eyes you've ever seen

and his hair was matted.

I felt as if I was looking at one of those Neptune images

of a man under the sea, you know, with a trident.

It was quite extraordinary.

So pleased with the picture.

MUSIC:
"Blue Peter Theme"

This year it's a matter of life and death.

GUNSHO There has been a war going on in West Africa for two years now.

It's a civil war between the Biafrans and the Nigerians.

We're not going to say which side is right or which side is wrong,

except that all war is always wrong.

I went two or three times.

Aeroplanes that used to take in aid

used to land on an extended road, which was their airstrip.

It was called Uli Airstrip and you went at night

and the Federal Government had hired,

you know, Russian pilots and foreign pilots

to try and shoot these planes down.

This one is flying the other side of the mission church,

sweeping to the right.

Streaking the ground as they move,

dropping incendiary bombs and fragmentation bombs

in the places around here.

So, going in to Uli Airstrip at night was a very hairy experience.

There are crews out there willing to fly, despite the lack of permission

and we will just try and fly in.

- But you stand a good chance of being shot down?

- I don't think so, no.

They seem to have been fairly trigger-happy in the past, though.

Anyway, we are going to try and let us see.

Ms Ryder, why are you going as well?

Well, because one feels very concerned, clearly,

with anyone who is suffering any distress anywhere

and partly because one has seen a situation in Europe,

in the past, perhaps similar to this.

PIANO MUSIC:

I walked into a camp which was actually an old school building

and there were 800 dying children, standing there, waiting for me.

You know, when you go into a camp with 800 dying children,

some of whom are actually dropping down and dying in front of me,

they think you're coming with some form of salvation.

They don't realise you're coming to take pictures and get information.

That's not what they want. You know, they want food.

I saw this particular boy that haunts me to this day.

He was an albino boy and he was standing, looking at me.

Barely managing to stand on his spindly legs.

When you're an albino in Africa,

you're singled out all the time for bullying and God knows what.

He was clutching a French corned beef tin,

some previous aid gift which he'd licked the interior completely dry.

And I thought, "I can't look at this boy." It was too much.

He was staring at me, so I went somewhere else

and spoke to a doctor, cos another child had collapsed

and was dying and suddenly, somebody touched my hand

and I looked down and it was the albino boy, he was holding my hand.

And I thought, "Why are you doing this to me?"

It was like he'd honed in on me and he was really paining me,

making me feel so ashamed.

So I gave him a barley sugar from my pocket and he went away

and he stood at a distance, licking this barley sugar.

There were children of two years old,

crawling around on their stomachs with their anus hanging out.

I've never seen anything so terrible in all my life,

the inside of their whole backside

had kind of invertedly kind of suddenly fell out

and they were dragging themselves around

with this inside-out situation of their bottoms,

with flies hanging on as they crawled.

I thought, this was worse than any inferno of insanity

that you could ever experience or see in your life.

It wasn't real, it was so horrible, so shocking.

And, you know, I almost become, well, I almost became paralysed.

I was so shocked.

I thought, "Take your mind off it. Take some pictures."

They said, "There's a girl you must see."

They said, "Her name is Patience."

They brought her in and she was completely naked.

She was 16 years of age,

days, if not one or two days, away from death.

And I thought, "How am I going to do this?"

And they sat her down and I asked the nurse

if she would place her hands over the lower part of her body,

cos I thought, you know,

"If I'm going to do this picture

"to show this terrible, shocking creature,

"I'm going to do it with as much dignity as I can rustle up

"and at least not take advantage of her nakedness."

You've never seen a more dignified person, you know,

you know, inches away from death.

PIANO MUSIC:

And I remember one day seeing a woman trying to feed a child at the breast.

There was nothing for the child at the breast.

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