Video – transcripts
Video 1 – early years
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DESCRIPTION: Don McCullin speaking in his home in 2009. Photographs are shown in the video as Don refers to pictures and photographers.
DON MCCULLIN: “Well, photography for me came by way of an accident because I did grow up in an appalling background where the only way you dealt with life was with your fist. You couldn’t always win and often you had a rather painful jaw to remind you that not always the biggest win. So you feel you couldn’t go on living like that and there seemed to be no way out. So, to grow up in a place like that, you’re a total 'no hoper'. So what was the way out?
“For me, I did National Service. I was luckily sent to a photographic section unit. I was in the Middle East and I started brushing up against people who did photography. That was part of their job in the Air Force. But sadly, because I couldn’t read very well, I failed the trade test and never came out of the Air Force as a qualified photographer. But at least I started to touch photography. I went back to the so-called ghetto where I grew up, a place called Finsbury Park in North London, and the danger was still there of me slipping back and hanging out with those boys.
“I suppose I would have become a criminal really if I hadn’t have discovered photography. It was my salvation. It was very difficult in those days to grow up without acquiring a criminal record because, you know, we hated the police, we hated all forms of restrictions - authoritarian people trying to crush us. We were the kind of people who thought we couldn’t be crushed. It’s a really good attitude to have really because it means you’re not going to go down - unless you go down and become an habitual criminal.
“I think my background is the very best possible background I could have had. It made me tough, it made me resilient, it made me kind of... there was an anger, a chip on my shoulder – huge. There was a huge problem of inferiority complex, socially. One should have had an anger against the middle class, the upper class. You know the structure of the social classes in England. Other countries wouldn’t understand it. It’s now been separated into those who have got the money and those who haven’t. It doesn’t matter about titles any more... so a lot of that has changed. But I always really felt happy because, going back to the underprivileged, I felt that I could photograph amongst them quite easily because I had the knowledge of what it’s like to be poor.
“You know, I’m a very complex person. I mean I’d get on the subway in the morning to go to work in Mayfair and I’d be aware of the fact that we didn’t have a bath in my house. I used to bath once a week and in the summer we’d go into the garden and my mother, with a cigarette hanging from her mouth, would stick a hosepipe out of the window and hose me down. I used to be terribly aware of going on the Piccadilly line to work every day thinking, or possibly knowing, there was a slight body odour - that I was carrying Finsbury Park to Mayfair.
“I never forget those days, so no one’s going to catch me out. I have risked my life time and time again to improve my life standards and my lifestyle. So I don’t believe I’m stealing from this society over and above anybody else. But, you know, I’m a man who reflects on the past and whatever future I've got left. I’m never going to surrender my humble beginnings.
“Studying the work of other photographers was the only way forward for me. I mean how would I know what photography meant. We didn’t use the word, the ‘art world’ in those days of photography. It was never associated with art, photography. It seems to have become so today but still not in my case. I don’t buy that ‘art world’ photography stuff. But yes, I did study the work of Bill Brandt. He was one of my earlier people and I actually met Bill. He was a very nice man. One of my true heroes in photography was always Alfred Stieglitz and then I moved on to Frederick Evans, Alvin Langdon Coburn and there was another crazy guy called Fred Holland Day. These are the people... and Peter Emerson who did the Norfolk Broads and people of that calibre. You know, my life has been much more interesting delving back into the world of those photographers, the pioneers.
“I can honestly say I’m self-taught because I bought books on photography and I looked. I didn’t read, I looked. I acquired photography by looking.”
Video 2 – bradford
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DESCRIPTION: Don McCullin speaking in his home in 2009. Photographs are shown in the video as Don refers to events and pictures.
DON MCCULLIN: “Well, the idea for my book, which was called Homecoming, was to try and get a grip of my kind of roaming of the world. I started losing my identity. I wanted to know who the hell I was and where I came from so I thought, we’ll go back and we’ll do something about England. I put the proposal to Macmillan’s, the publishers, and they said ‘Yes’ and then I had to go off and do something. I started doing what Sir Benjamin Stone did at the turn of the century, where he went around photographing festivals. Of course Tony Ray-Jones did the same thing and I think Ray-Jones did it much better of course - but with different equipment. But I thought I would not be Tony Ray-Jones or Benjamin Stone, I would just be me, I would let myself fall into situations. It seemed as if, after a few events on the coast of England, I fell into Bradford all of a sudden.
“I remember going to Bradford many years ago for The Observer. I remember checking into the Midland Hotel and I remember to this day putting my shoes out to be cleaned. I had never stayed at a hotel like that in my life and for me that was really upmarket and that was nothing, the Midland Hotel. And I remember the man polishing the brasses that go up to the stairs and things like that. He was quite happy this man. That never escaped my attention either, you know, the idea of cleaning brasses in a hotel. It wasn’t exactly as if he was the lowest of the low. He took pride in it and my shoes came back polished. When I went back donkey’s years later and I went through Bradford, it was like going down into a volcanic basin. I dropped down into the city and then I saw the Alhambra theatre and places like that. Then I went the other side, up to the Thornton Road and Lumb Lane and I got out of my car and I walked. You can’t photograph from your car you know.
“Then I met these people and they kept saying, ‘Are you from the Press?’ because they saw my camera - no one saw a camera on anybody in Bradford in those days. I said, ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am’. She said, ‘Right, get in this house, you’. She had a child with her and in one of my pictures you will see the child and her in the kitchen, a terrible, terrible place. She said, ‘Take the gentleman into the house and show him and tell him about the long tails’. I thought, what’s she talking about, this woman? I said, ‘What do you mean, long tails?’ and she said, ‘The rats’. Of course, all those Victorian hovels would have been perfectly nice houses if you had the money to do them up.
“Then I started meeting one family after another. Then I found the Bellevue pub which I went in, even though I’m not a pub man. I’ve never been interested in pubs and things. But I went in because I knew where that it was the hub of the area around there, the poor area.
“I remember it had on a notice that said ‘Tonight: Stripper’ and I said to one of the people, ‘Do you think that I could photograph the stripper?’ and he said, ‘Oh no, you’ll have to ask Johnny the bouncer’. So I asked Johnny the bouncer, who was a West Indian, ‘Do you think I could photograph the stripper?’ and he said, ‘Oh no. She’s a student in the first place and she wouldn’t like it. But, I tell you what. If you give me a fiver, I think I might be able to smooth it over’. So I gave him five pounds and, sure enough, he let me get away with it. So there was nothing you couldn’t do in Bradford. The people were lovely, they were kind and they were almost dragging me in to photograph them. They were only asking me to record their loss, discuss the way they were having to live as human beings. I thought, God, you know you can’t lose in Bradford, photographically. Every time you turned a corner - like the man in Lumb Lane on the crutches. He actually lifted one of the crutches up to hit me and found himself nearly falling and I had to rush to save him. He said, ‘Leave me alone. Leave me alone’.
I used to come back to where I lived in Hertfordshire to process my film. I couldn’t wait to get back in my car and drive up the A1 to Bradford. I went to Bradford a couple of years ago and I went down into the city and checked into the hotel. Then I thought, I’ll just drive up the road to the Bellevue and all round that area. Suddenly, I thought, I’ll turn left here and a policeman said, ‘Keep going. Keep going’. I thought, something’s going on. So I parked the car and walked and I found a whole load of people flaying their bare bodies with knives, celebrating the day of Ashura, a Shi’a festival. It was snowing and I thought, you know, you can never lose in Bradford, visually.”
Video 3 – poverty
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DESCRIPTION: Don McCullin speaking in his home in 2009. Photographs are shown in the video as Don refers to events and pictures.
DON MCCULLIN: “I spent many years walking in the East End of London which is the Dickensian side of London where the really poor live - because they all live in West Kensington and Chelsea, the really rich ones. So London is a division in a way and I always chose... I never wandered around Chelsea photographing, for instance.
“Recently within the last couple of years I went to Royal Ascot, a place I’ve never been to where you really do see the privileged. But even that’s been slightly tarnished now because people who are getting in there are not totally from Chelsea or Berkshire or somewhere. I always preferred to roam around the back streets of East London round Aldgate.
“There would be a populace of people on all street corners - lying on the floor, begging for money, begging for a cup of tea. Photographically it was a fruit salad; you could not miss. If I’d have closed my eyes and put the camera to my face and clicked the button, I would still have walked away with an amazing image.
“On the other hand, that sounds very conceited of me - contemptuous and foolish. But nobody exercised that privilege of walking around with the camera with greater concern and respect. I used to approach those people very carefully and try to seek out their consent to take pictures. They are not going to say, ‘Hey, you, take my picture!’, you know, they are not going to say that are they? But I would gauge by my eyes. I would look at them and they’d look at me. Occasionally I could feel hostility.
“I got up week after week after week when I worked on The Sunday Times and drove my car into London because I lived in the countryside. I drove my car and parked it about a mile away from the East End. You could in those days because there were no parking meters. Then I’d put on an old overcoat and I’d walk to the centre of where this world existed in Aldgate in London, with one of my Nikon Fs under my old overcoat and my Dr Martens boots. I couldn’t have been more happy because I was walking towards a challenge. I used to criss-cross and walk the area all day long, all day in the coldest of days and, sooner or later, I would turn the corner and there would be an image.
“The streets of our society are full of food, creatively. If you want to go in the streets, it’s yours. That is what was so compelling for me about photography. Some days it didn’t work. Some days I’d go there, I’d drive 30 miles into London, walk all day long, freezing cold, going back in my car to Hertfordshire, and not have a decent roll of film, a decent picture. But it’s like a man who sits by a river, fishing. It doesn’t mean to say you’ve got to catch fish. Those experiences didn’t mean that I should have been rewarded for walking around all day. I already was rewarded by just being there, learning about humanity.
“One of the things I always thought about photography, because I wasn’t very bright as a young man – because I didn’t have this education, having left school at fifteen – was that the great thing about photography was that you can hide, not so much behind the camera but you can hide from having to come up with any kind of special reasons. I thought, as long as I’ve got the camera I can hide behind it. I can do landscapes. No one is going to ask me any serious questions. Wasn’t I wrong! And also, it wasn’t political. Wasn’t I wrong again, because everything I’ve ever done in my life has been political! I do have the answers to some of those things. I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. Nobody can tell me what to say, whether it was true or false because I was there and I not only recorded it, but I saw it.”
Video 4 – changes in england
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DESCRIPTION: Don McCullin speaking in his home in 2009. Photographs are shown in the video as Don refers to events and pictures.
DON MCCULLIN: “The England that I grew up in no longer exists. We have had a massive influx of people from all over the world. It’s not just the usual old colonial places. They’ve come from Afghanistan, they’ve come from Iraq - countries we never ruled or stole in the old days. We live in a totally different society. We have totally different values.
“We are not as class conscious as we used to be but there is still that barrier there. It’s still there... I've slightly crossed over from my beginnings... because if you start being recognised in your field, whether you play football or you do this or that, you know. Luckily for me I don’t fall into that celebrity area which doesn’t apply to people like me. It only applies to glamour and football players and people like that. Luckily, I’ve managed to keep in my own little zone. But, you know, I’ve crossed all these barriers now and I don’t have any uncomfortableness about any of it. You can’t marginalise yourself because that cuts out the possibility of learning. If you say, I’m not going to do this, I’m not going to do that, well, okay, you lose. So I’ve crossed all these barriers and I don’t have any complexes any more. I did in the beginning. There was a thing about me in the beginning that was cautious about everything. I’m still cautious but I don’t feel uncomfortable any more.
“This country had a suffocating effect on you when you came from my background seventy odd years ago. Now it’s a much more open society. But I think it’s slightly more tricky in a way... It’s going to come down to what the Americans feel. Our currency of life will be money and that’s what worries me really. In America it’s the same. I lived in America, was married to an American once, and I never felt good when I was there. It’s nice to visit. But I don’t want England to be a nice to visit place for me because I live here. It’s a tricky place this country. But if you’re a photographer, you can exploit some of those unpleasant and tricky sides to it.
“I mean, just by my going to Royal Ascot for my book On England. Of course I was exploiting the people who were so pleased with themselves to be wearing top hat and tails. It was heaven for me. Having said that... I said, ‘May I photograph this lovely privileged day?’ and one of the ladies turned around and said to me, ‘Of course you may, why don’t you stay and have a bit of lunch’, because they were having this picnic out the back. So, sometimes these people you go to distrust and dislike suddenly can turn around and wipe the floor from under you by such a courteous gesture. You know, no-one has ever said that to me if I’m in the East End – ‘Come and have a bite to eat with us’. It’s tricky this country, but I like that really because it’s a challenge.”