McCullin Page #8

And it was just, it was murder from the word go.

MUSIC:

They started, you know, collecting prisoners.

It all happened so quickly.

I went to a house where I could hear a lot of women and children screaming.

A Christian was bringing the women and children down

the side of this stairwell and I could see two Palestinian young men

with their hands up, in the left-hand side of the stairwell.

The moment the women went out of the house,

the man next to me, and I was very close, you know,

very close, started opening up and killing these people in cold blood, immediately.

And they went down in a hail of bullets and blood, all up the wall.

And I went round the back of the stairwell, another stairwell,

and try to get a grip of myself, cos I was so shocked.

I couldn't believe what I had just seen.

I came out of the building

and there was another Christian gunman who had the women and children

and he said, "By the way, if I see you taking any pictures,

"I am going to kill you myself. Get out of here."

Everywhere I went that day,

I could see another person being murdered in front of me.

Of course, what I did eventually was get the picture of the man

playing the lute over the dead Palestinian girl's body.

They were so angry about it when it was published that they said

if they ever caught the man who took the picture, they would kill him.

In a way, it was almost an honour

that they wanted to kill me for taking the picture.

The 26-storey Holiday Inn is burning.

The third of a trio of five-star hotels

to be caught in the firing line.

This is the courtyard of the Hilton Hotel

and it was here that the fighting took place all last night.

When the Islamics overwhelmed part of the Christian area where I was,

they were actually ensconced in the Hilton Hotel and when they got in,

the Christians that they'd captured in there,

they took them to the top floor and they mutilated them

in a manly sense, by cutting off part of them, and they threw them,

alive, off the top of the building.

When it gets down to that kind of hatred,

it becomes a form of insanity.

It goes beyond your understanding of anything. Anything.

I don't know how he did it. He had a very sensitive conscience.

I would often call him "the conscience with a camera".

He had a very sensitive feel for other people's suffering,

which also gave him the impetus to feel,

"I can make people wake up to what is really going on here".

So the sensitivity which might have made him

recoil from the images was allied to this conscience of his which says,

"I've got to get this story. It can only be told by photographs."

His journalism, which is best when that cold eye of his,

if you like, was informed by the warmth of his empathy,

and by the text, which amplified the image which you could see.

It's an awful question to ask you, but do you think the images you take

of horror, of war, actually make anybody change their mind about it?

Actually, to be honest, I don't think they have.

I've been photographing war for about 16 years

and I've got very disillusioned.

And I've just had an exhibition

and the exhibition was mostly attended by very young people

and judging by the letters that I have received, which were many,

the people who wrote to me were very young people

and they are the people who care about war.

I think the rest of us, the middle-aged,

I hate to say this, people, they've had war and they've had enough of it.

I think they are sick about hearing about it now.

They think there is no solution, but the young people,

who are tomorrow's people,

they are more interested about trying to do something about it.

They feel ashamed of it and can't understand it.

I mean, why don't you settle for the easy life and earn 500 quid

a day taking pictures of ladies wearing bras and things?

- Or not wearing bras?

- I would probably get a heart attack.

LAUGHTER:

Did you like this one? The sulky lover?

You would be if you had a face like that against you.

THEY LAUGH:

This is one of my favourite pictures. I don't have many favourites.

It's a classic example of intrusion, of course,

but it's just showing the English.

The deckchairs says it all, doesn't it?

One thing about England, you can guarantee to find

all kinds of kind of crazy people in the summer.

There's not, I don't think there is a country quite like this country

for the diversities of people's manifestations.

You know, eccentrics.

You can get them by the bus-load here in England. I love it.

MUSIC:
"This Is England" by The Clash

# I hear a gang fire on a human factory farm

# Are they howling out or doing somebody harm?

# On a catwalk jungle somebody grabbed my arm

# A voice spoke so cold, it matched the weapon in her palm

# This is England

# This knife of Sheffield steel

# This is England

# This is how we feel

# This is England... #

When the print unions sabotaged the Sunday Times,

they basically killed the paper.

The Thomson Organisation said, "We can't go on like this.

"We can't have the paper wrecked not only physically but economically."

So they put the paper up for sale.

And they had a perception, a judgement,

that Rupert Murdoch, with his history of being pretty tough,

would be better able to control the print unions.

And in some respects, that was a fair judgement.

You've had enough photographs. I think we really...

- And with Mr Evans.

- Mr Evans.

And though he made promises about the papers would maintain

their independence, he did not keep them.

And this, of course, was very, very bad news for British journalism

but it was also bad news, individually, for Don McCullin.

When Murdoch took over the Sunday Times

and Harold Evans went over to the Times newspaper,

we all felt that, you know, we were looking at the beginning of the end.

And I had had 18 fantastic years there.

The precious independence that he'd had and the ability to go

and tell an unvarnished truth through the medium of film

was now at risk, and so it proved to be.

MUSIC:

The Falklands War suddenly appeared on the horizon and I thought,

"I want to be in on this, because for the first time in my life,

"I'm going to be in a big, international war with British soldiers."

You know, I thought I was the natural person

and to my astonishment, I was barred.

It didn't happen.

I was left behind and I was utterly miserable and devastated.

It was an appalling decision to keep Don McCullin off the boat,

creating the excuse that boat was full.

It seemed to be saying, "Your photography is so honest,

"so searing, so implicit with meaning, we can't take the risk

"of you accessing freedom of expression."

I thought it was the most appalling decision

and its effect on him was to seem to say,

"You've spent your life documenting things

"we don't think you should ever have documented,"

which, of course, was saying, "Why have you bothered?

"Why have you bothered to risk your life to try and tell the truth?"

That's the reason I went back to Lebanon,

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