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Tonight's Imagine presents an intimate portrait | 0:00:02 | 0:00:03 | |
of the great British war photographer and photojournalist | 0:00:03 | 0:00:06 | |
Don McCullin. | 0:00:06 | 0:00:08 | |
In his early 20s, and with no formal training, | 0:00:08 | 0:00:11 | |
McCullin began his career here in Finsbury Park, | 0:00:11 | 0:00:14 | |
photographing the violent teenage gangs ruling the roost in the 1950s. | 0:00:14 | 0:00:20 | |
He would go on to capture history as it was being made, | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
bearing witness to the bloodiest conflicts of the last 50 years. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:28 | |
Despite announcing his retirement from the warzone ten years ago, | 0:00:28 | 0:00:32 | |
after returning from Iraq, | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
McCullin decided to make a trip to Syria late last year. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:39 | |
He wanted to show the human side of the ongoing conflict in Aleppo, | 0:00:39 | 0:00:43 | |
where, not for the first time in his career, he came under sniper fire. | 0:00:43 | 0:00:48 | |
A self-confessed war junkie, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:50 | |
Don McCullin's quest to bring the ugly truths of the war | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
to international attention would come at great personal cost. | 0:00:54 | 0:00:59 | |
Jacqui and David Morris's often graphic film | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
lays bare the addiction to danger, and the commitment to justice, | 0:01:03 | 0:01:07 | |
that lie at the heart of this extraordinary life. | 0:01:07 | 0:01:10 | |
This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing. | 0:01:13 | 0:01:19 | |
War is partly madness, mostly insanity, | 0:01:34 | 0:01:38 | |
and the rest of it is schizophrenia. | 0:01:38 | 0:01:41 | |
You do ask yourself, "Why am I here? What's my purpose? | 0:01:44 | 0:01:49 | |
"What's this got to do with photography?" | 0:01:49 | 0:01:51 | |
And it goes on and on, the questioning. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:55 | |
You're trying to stay alive, you're trying to take pictures, | 0:01:55 | 0:01:57 | |
you're trying to justify your presence there. | 0:01:57 | 0:02:00 | |
And you think, "What good is this going to do anyway? | 0:02:00 | 0:02:02 | |
"These people have already been killed." | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
There were many battles within my own mind, | 0:02:07 | 0:02:10 | |
before I got to these major conflicts. | 0:02:10 | 0:02:12 | |
And when I got there, I was even more confused. | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
I try to stay calm. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:20 | |
I try not to indulge myself in this picture-taking. | 0:02:20 | 0:02:25 | |
It was something I was meant to do, but how far was I allowed to take it? | 0:02:25 | 0:02:33 | |
There was a lot of hypocrisy spinning around | 0:02:37 | 0:02:39 | |
inside my own mind at the time. | 0:02:39 | 0:02:41 | |
I didn't really think, um, it was right to be there, | 0:02:41 | 0:02:47 | |
because I sometimes felt that | 0:02:47 | 0:02:48 | |
the people who were doing these terrible things | 0:02:48 | 0:02:52 | |
thought, you know, that I was OK-ing it, | 0:02:52 | 0:02:57 | |
which I certainly wasn't. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:00 | |
The first execution I ever saw in my life | 0:03:23 | 0:03:26 | |
was a dawn execution of a bomber who had killed a load of people | 0:03:26 | 0:03:30 | |
in the Saigon market a few weeks before. | 0:03:30 | 0:03:33 | |
And there were all these photographers and journalists, | 0:03:33 | 0:03:36 | |
they were all on this Jeep, you couldn't get another man on, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:38 | |
and there was nowhere I could see. But I saw the event. | 0:03:38 | 0:03:42 | |
They brought the man, in a Volkswagen truck. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:44 | |
He got out and screamed anti-Americans. | 0:03:44 | 0:03:47 | |
The firing squad shot him. | 0:03:47 | 0:03:49 | |
A man stepped forward, grabbed a turf of his hair, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:53 | |
and shot him through the brains. | 0:03:53 | 0:03:55 | |
And I stood there with my mouth wide open. | 0:03:55 | 0:03:57 | |
And I heard a man saying, | 0:03:57 | 0:03:58 | |
"God, that was great stuff, did you get it, did you get it?" | 0:03:58 | 0:04:01 | |
And I have never forgotten, to this day, and that was in 1965, | 0:04:01 | 0:04:06 | |
and I didn't get it. | 0:04:06 | 0:04:08 | |
And I never said anything about this situation | 0:04:08 | 0:04:10 | |
to the people in the Sunday Times, because they would have thought | 0:04:10 | 0:04:13 | |
I must have been a rank amateur not to have got such a picture. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:18 | |
But, looking back, | 0:04:18 | 0:04:20 | |
did I have the right to take that man's picture of his murder? | 0:04:20 | 0:04:25 | |
Because, in a way, public executions are nothing less than murder. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:29 | |
And I didn't get the picture. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
MUSIC AND APPLAUSE | 0:04:41 | 0:04:44 | |
You came from a fairly rough background, didn't you, in London? | 0:04:52 | 0:04:56 | |
It seems an unlikely ambition to have, your first ambition, | 0:04:56 | 0:04:59 | |
to be a painter. Was that regarded as a bit sissy? | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
Well, yes, it was, because where I live, | 0:05:02 | 0:05:05 | |
you were expected to take on anybody. | 0:05:05 | 0:05:07 | |
You'd never back down from an argument. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:09 | |
I used to get some terrible hidings when I was a boy. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:11 | |
But my father, when he was alive, | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
he used to let me draw on the kitchen wall. | 0:05:13 | 0:05:16 | |
And I'd actually stick pieces of paper on the wall, | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
but I went over the edge, so there was always | 0:05:19 | 0:05:21 | |
empty pictures with marvellous edges. | 0:05:21 | 0:05:23 | |
RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER | 0:05:23 | 0:05:25 | |
I lived in a house that was a tenement house, | 0:05:25 | 0:05:27 | |
so we could knock huge nails in the walls and stick things on the walls. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:30 | |
I wouldn't let my kids do it now but... | 0:05:30 | 0:05:33 | |
My art career didn't last very long, | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
because I got a junior art scholarship, | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
and my father died and I had to go to work. | 0:05:40 | 0:05:43 | |
MUSIC: "Move It" by Cliff Richard | 0:05:45 | 0:05:49 | |
# Come on, pretty baby, let's move it and a-groove it | 0:05:52 | 0:05:54 | |
# Well, shake, oh, baby, shake, oh, honey, please don't lose it | 0:05:57 | 0:06:01 | |
# It's rhythm that gets into your heart and soul | 0:06:03 | 0:06:06 | |
# Well, let me tell you, baby, it's called rock'n'roll. # | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
I took a set of pictures of the boys I grew up with. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:20 | |
They were involved in the killing of a policeman. | 0:06:20 | 0:06:24 | |
They didn't actually kill the policeman, | 0:06:24 | 0:06:26 | |
the rival gang that came from Islington, | 0:06:26 | 0:06:28 | |
they were responsible for that killing. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:30 | |
So, I took the photos to the Observer. | 0:06:30 | 0:06:33 | |
They asked me to do more. I did more. | 0:06:33 | 0:06:35 | |
They published the photos. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:37 | |
They gave me the princely sum of £50. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:40 | |
In those days, £50 from where I came from was like five weeks' wages. | 0:06:40 | 0:06:47 | |
And then, I was, I suppose you could say, I was on the road to photography | 0:06:47 | 0:06:51 | |
which has been a lifelong love affair. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:53 | |
It has been really an amazing experience for me. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:56 | |
Because you've got to remember, I don't have any education, | 0:06:56 | 0:06:59 | |
I couldn't read properly. | 0:06:59 | 0:07:01 | |
I came from a violent background where people were mostly interested | 0:07:01 | 0:07:04 | |
in how well you could fight or steal, or do harm to society. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:08 | |
So, quite honestly, having this amazing door opening, someone saying, | 0:07:08 | 0:07:15 | |
"There's your freedom from ignorance and bigotry and violence." | 0:07:15 | 0:07:20 | |
It was amazing I managed to escape from Finsbury Park. | 0:07:20 | 0:07:24 | |
I've often wondered, how did he get that first memorable, | 0:07:26 | 0:07:30 | |
urban landscape of the lads, the gang, | 0:07:30 | 0:07:33 | |
The Guv'nors, as they were called in East London, | 0:07:33 | 0:07:36 | |
standing in a derelict house? | 0:07:36 | 0:07:38 | |
Perfectly framed by the building, | 0:07:38 | 0:07:41 | |
and seeing right through the building. | 0:07:41 | 0:07:44 | |
It was so emblematic of gang warfare and the roughness of London. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
And here we have a picture which is almost beautiful in its composition. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:52 | |
You could say, there is no beauty in what this gang was up to. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:56 | |
But he related, he had a sensitivity. | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
An empathy is something you can't fake. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:01 | |
This is the bloke I gave a good hiding to. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
HE LAUGHS | 0:08:07 | 0:08:09 | |
He tried to hit me with a brick. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:11 | |
We had all been to a funeral. | 0:08:13 | 0:08:15 | |
One of the little girls had committed suicide, | 0:08:15 | 0:08:18 | |
put her head in a gas oven over some bloke I grew up with. | 0:08:18 | 0:08:22 | |
We came back from the funeral, and he ran past my car | 0:08:22 | 0:08:25 | |
and snapped the wing mirror off. | 0:08:25 | 0:08:27 | |
And he was peeing in this alleyway, | 0:08:27 | 0:08:29 | |
that's when I should really have laid into him, while he was peeing, | 0:08:29 | 0:08:32 | |
because it's difficult to fight back if you're in a situation like that. | 0:08:32 | 0:08:36 | |
Then he picked a brick up, came roaring at me. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:38 | |
Then I managed to get hold of it and reverse the charges. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:42 | |
Wasn't I lucky to have grown up in a period of the '60s, '70s, the '80s, | 0:08:45 | 0:08:51 | |
when it was all happening? | 0:08:51 | 0:08:53 | |
It was as if, like it was carved out for me, really. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:58 | |
I did grasp the nettle, | 0:08:58 | 0:09:00 | |
I didn't just look at it and think, "God, I wish I was there." | 0:09:00 | 0:09:03 | |
I used to say, "I'm going to go there." And I did. | 0:09:03 | 0:09:07 | |
-NEWSREEL: -Paris in the spring of 1961, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:11 | |
and the time of President Kennedy's visit, was as beautiful as ever. | 0:09:11 | 0:09:15 | |
I was in Paris with my wife, my new wife really, | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
we'd only been married a few weeks. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:25 | |
And I was like a fish out of water really, | 0:09:25 | 0:09:28 | |
because I couldn't speak the language. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:30 | |
And whilst we were in Paris, I saw somebody reading a newspaper. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
It was a photograph of an East German soldier | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
jumping over some barbed wire, which was only, at that stage, | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
separating them from the West. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:44 | |
Of course, the story had been building up, | 0:09:45 | 0:09:48 | |
potentially been building up. | 0:09:48 | 0:09:50 | |
I looked at this photograph, it was a memorable picture. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
And I said to her, "When we get back to England," | 0:09:53 | 0:09:56 | |
knowing I only had £70 in my savings account, | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
"would you mind if I went to Berlin?" | 0:10:00 | 0:10:02 | |
And she said, "Of course I don't mind." | 0:10:02 | 0:10:04 | |
-NEWSREEL: -The East Germans don't seem to have girders enough | 0:10:04 | 0:10:08 | |
to plug every hole. | 0:10:08 | 0:10:09 | |
When a soldier's attention is diverted by others, | 0:10:09 | 0:10:11 | |
a hole is cut in the barbed wire, | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
and Khrushchev's face is slapped again. | 0:10:13 | 0:10:17 | |
I rang the Observer newspaper, and they said, | 0:10:17 | 0:10:19 | |
"We're not interested in you going." | 0:10:19 | 0:10:21 | |
And I said, "Well, I bought the ticket." There was no commission. | 0:10:21 | 0:10:25 | |
So, I got near to a place called Friedrichstrasse, | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
which was the centre of all the problem. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
The Americans were facing the Russians. | 0:10:31 | 0:10:34 | |
There were tanks facing each other. | 0:10:34 | 0:10:37 | |
At that stage, in Friedrichstrasse, | 0:10:37 | 0:10:39 | |
they were actually building the beginnings of the Berlin Wall. | 0:10:39 | 0:10:42 | |
This was really the right place to be. | 0:10:42 | 0:10:47 | |
-NEWSREEL: -Camera crews are harassed by reflecting mirrors | 0:10:47 | 0:10:50 | |
held by East German police. | 0:10:50 | 0:10:52 | |
Water hoses are played on equipment. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:54 | |
Nevertheless, our reporters are able to come up with remarkable pictures, | 0:10:54 | 0:10:57 | |
despite these hazards. | 0:10:57 | 0:11:00 | |
My camera equipment wasn't very good, actually. | 0:11:00 | 0:11:02 | |
I had a camera I had bought during my time in the air force. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:06 | |
It was totally the wrong shape | 0:11:06 | 0:11:08 | |
to give me the kind of pictures that I needed. | 0:11:08 | 0:11:12 | |
But, nevertheless, I stretched the use of this camera, kneeling down | 0:11:12 | 0:11:15 | |
and holding it up high and doing all kinds of funny things with it. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:19 | |
By the time that I'd been there a few days, | 0:11:20 | 0:11:23 | |
that wall went up pretty fast. And people could not escape. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
And I looked at East German soldiers | 0:11:29 | 0:11:31 | |
leaning out of buildings on the other side of the wall, with binoculars. | 0:11:31 | 0:11:36 | |
And looking right at me. And I thought, | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
"They can't hurt me, because they're over there and I'm here." | 0:11:39 | 0:11:44 | |
It was very exciting, it was at the heightened part of the Cold War | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
where the Russians were quite prepared | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
to make a stand against the West, and vice versa. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
What it really comes down to is that I was sitting on top of | 0:11:55 | 0:11:58 | |
the most important news story in the world. | 0:11:58 | 0:12:01 | |
And it was my decision, | 0:12:01 | 0:12:04 | |
this intuition that took me there in the first place. | 0:12:05 | 0:12:08 | |
So, I was beginning to show signs of having a brain | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
that was functioning in the right direction. | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
I came back to England with the film | 0:12:16 | 0:12:19 | |
and got it processed in the Observer's darkroom. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:22 | |
And they saw the pictures and they ran half a page of my story. | 0:12:22 | 0:12:28 | |
The story was then entered into the news category | 0:12:28 | 0:12:31 | |
for the News Pictures of the Year. And I won this award. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:36 | |
And the Observer gave me a contract after that. | 0:12:36 | 0:12:38 | |
So, I started getting better jobs at the Observer. | 0:12:47 | 0:12:49 | |
I started going to all kinds of political rallies and things. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
I would go to the East End of London | 0:12:56 | 0:12:58 | |
and photograph disturbances with Oswald Mosley, situations like that. | 0:12:58 | 0:13:03 | |
It was a developing and an expanding situation | 0:13:06 | 0:13:08 | |
for the early part of my career. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:10 | |
-NEWSREEL: -The tinderbox that is Cyprus threatens to erupt | 0:13:20 | 0:13:22 | |
into a full-scale war. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:23 | |
Greek students demonstrate against British and US proposals | 0:13:23 | 0:13:28 | |
that a force of NATO troops help maintain a truce on the island | 0:13:28 | 0:13:31 | |
until differences between Greeks and Turks can be resolved. | 0:13:31 | 0:13:34 | |
I walked into the Observer office one day, and the editor said to me, | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
"How would you consider covering the civil war for us in Cyprus?" | 0:13:37 | 0:13:42 | |
And at that point in my life, I wasn't ready. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
And I felt that, when I think about those words, I think, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:51 | |
I must have been levitating. I felt as if I was rising off the ground. | 0:13:51 | 0:13:55 | |
I knew that the second door was opening. | 0:13:55 | 0:13:58 | |
-NEWSREEL: -The terror of civil war struck Cyprus in December. | 0:13:58 | 0:14:02 | |
On Boxing Day, the British came in to stop the bloodshed. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:05 | |
So, I thought, I'm going to do my best here. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:07 | |
And I'm going to make an impression. This is my big chance. | 0:14:07 | 0:14:10 | |
So, I went to the Turkish community. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:14 | |
And they were surrounded by the Greeks. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:16 | |
I managed to slip past the roadblocks and get in. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:18 | |
I could hear gunfire. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:23 | |
That was the first time I had heard, in my life, hostile gunfire. | 0:14:23 | 0:14:28 | |
And then, suddenly, out of the cinema burst a man with a machine gun, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:33 | |
and he had a raincoat on and a flat hat. | 0:14:33 | 0:14:37 | |
And he looked like something like a Sicilian Mafioso bandit. | 0:14:37 | 0:14:41 | |
And then people ran out with mattresses on their heads, | 0:14:43 | 0:14:47 | |
women and children, as if a mattress would stop a bullet. | 0:14:47 | 0:14:50 | |
And this was my baptism of war. | 0:14:50 | 0:14:54 | |
I had to assess very quickly what was going on, | 0:14:55 | 0:14:58 | |
where the fire was coming from. | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
As the day wore on, we were trapped in these empty streets. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:06 | |
There were groups of fighters, Turkish defenders. | 0:15:06 | 0:15:09 | |
And funny, curious things caught my eye. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:13 | |
I could remember a group of men behind barricades. | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
It was almost like the Spanish Civil War, really. | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
And by the barricade, there were men with an ill-assorted bunch of weapons | 0:15:19 | 0:15:24 | |
and old, almost muskety-looking kind of museum pieces. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:29 | |
But standing near this group of men was a beautiful dog. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:35 | |
I thought, "Why is it that these things come to you, | 0:15:40 | 0:15:44 | |
"when you should be thinking about more serious things?" | 0:15:44 | 0:15:47 | |
But to be truthful, these little things sometimes tell you | 0:15:47 | 0:15:52 | |
much more about a story than the obvious things. | 0:15:52 | 0:15:57 | |
So, I think what I'm getting down to here is, | 0:15:57 | 0:16:01 | |
we're talking about sensitivity. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:02 | |
What I had to realise at the time, I was learning a new trade. | 0:16:05 | 0:16:09 | |
I was learning about the price of humanity and its sufferings. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:14 | |
-NEWSREEL: -Now, four months later, the armed forces of both sides | 0:16:19 | 0:16:22 | |
are still defying the UN's attempts to keep the peace. | 0:16:22 | 0:16:26 | |
And the Cyprus situation is as dangerous and complex as ever. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:30 | |
The UN is powerless to do anything | 0:16:30 | 0:16:32 | |
that would really help restore law and order. | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
I saw a whole village trying to evacuate, they were being attacked, | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
to somewhere with more safety, like a school building. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:46 | |
And there was this one old lady, who was lame, and she had two sticks. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:50 | |
And she really couldn't get those legs moving. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
And there was a British soldier trying to coax her along, | 0:16:53 | 0:16:56 | |
persuade her to hurry up before she'd probably lose her life. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:59 | |
And I was with a friend of mine, I said, "This is ridiculous." | 0:16:59 | 0:17:02 | |
I took one picture of the soldier and the old lady, | 0:17:02 | 0:17:04 | |
and I put my cameras down. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:06 | |
And I scooped this old lady up in my arms. | 0:17:06 | 0:17:09 | |
It was like scooping up some rag doll that had fallen from a child's pram. | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
I just ran and ran with her. I don't know why I did it. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
But I didn't really want to see that old lady shot down and killed. | 0:17:16 | 0:17:19 | |
And I went back to my position as a photographer, and I carried on. | 0:17:19 | 0:17:24 | |
But it made me feel good. | 0:17:24 | 0:17:26 | |
I it made me feel as if I wasn't just there as a voyeur | 0:17:26 | 0:17:29 | |
that was enjoying other people's misery and possible deaths. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:34 | |
It's a very fine line. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:37 | |
I've been constantly accused of taking terrible pictures | 0:17:37 | 0:17:41 | |
and people saying, "Did you ever help anyone?" | 0:17:41 | 0:17:43 | |
Of course I did. But I don't want to brag about it. | 0:17:43 | 0:17:47 | |
I did it sometimes to clear my own conscience. | 0:17:47 | 0:17:50 | |
These little battles were erupting all over | 0:18:06 | 0:18:08 | |
the northern part of the island of Cyprus, where the Turks lived. | 0:18:08 | 0:18:13 | |
We saw this soldier looking at the bodies, and I said, | 0:18:13 | 0:18:15 | |
"What's happening?" He said, "There's been some killing," he said, | 0:18:15 | 0:18:19 | |
"There's a dead body up there and some more in that house." | 0:18:19 | 0:18:24 | |
I knocked on the door, I tapped on this door and there was no answer. | 0:18:24 | 0:18:28 | |
And I let myself in. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:32 | |
And the first thing I was greeted with was warm blood. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:36 | |
These men had been murdered the day before, | 0:18:40 | 0:18:42 | |
and the warm, early morning sunlight had penetrated through | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
the glass door of this house. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:47 | |
And I closed the door and I tiptoed around the room, | 0:18:47 | 0:18:50 | |
and I got myself in a corner, and I was taking the first shot. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
And suddenly, the door opened and, to my horror, the whole family burst in. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
I thought, my God, they're going to be really cross, finding me in here. | 0:19:00 | 0:19:05 | |
To my astonishment, they weren't, so I carried on photographing. | 0:19:05 | 0:19:10 | |
And there was a woman who started screaming like mad. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:14 | |
And the truth was that it was her husband who was just below my feet, | 0:19:14 | 0:19:17 | |
who was dead. A new husband at that, they had only been married a week. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:21 | |
And the Greeks came the day before and attacked this community | 0:19:21 | 0:19:25 | |
and murdered these people in cold blood in this house. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:29 | |
I'd go into a village one day, and I got there in the early morning. | 0:19:34 | 0:19:40 | |
And they were finding bodies of Turkish men | 0:19:40 | 0:19:42 | |
who were defending the villages. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
And then they were coming back to the village | 0:19:44 | 0:19:46 | |
and telling women that their husbands had been killed. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:48 | |
And then you saw these Goya-esque kind of poses | 0:19:48 | 0:19:52 | |
of people looking up to Christ. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
I've noticed that a lot in wars. | 0:19:55 | 0:19:57 | |
When people are in deep grief and emotion, they look up | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
as if they can see God himself there, offering them some help. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
And you see that in Goya's drawings. | 0:20:05 | 0:20:08 | |
Before men are being shot or massacred, | 0:20:08 | 0:20:11 | |
they look up, or they are praying, | 0:20:11 | 0:20:13 | |
and it's part of that religious nature of the great painters. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:17 | |
That moment is so classic. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:22 | |
I call it one of the decisive moments in photography. | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
Because it combines the news moments with the compositional elements | 0:20:25 | 0:20:30 | |
which make a photograph in themselves. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:32 | |
So, there is something, a second or two would have made a difference. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:37 | |
I asked Don how he took the picture. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:42 | |
As I recall it, he actually had to fall to his knees quickly to get it | 0:20:42 | 0:20:46 | |
because he just sensed it was coming. | 0:20:46 | 0:20:48 | |
I mean, OK, I talk as if there's a lot of poetry in me. | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
There isn't. I'm a photographer. I am neither an artist or a poet. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:03 | |
I'm a photographer. | 0:21:03 | 0:21:05 | |
And one of the things I've learned most of all, erm, | 0:21:05 | 0:21:10 | |
over and above photography, | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
the very best qualifications you can have when you are in this situation, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:17 | |
and you are exercising this duty as a photographer, or whatever, reporter, | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
is that it's much better to be on the side of humanity. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:27 | |
All this was coming at me so fast, this responsibility. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:33 | |
And I felt, almost from the word go, I got a grip of it, | 0:21:33 | 0:21:37 | |
and I thought, I understand what I'm doing for the first time. | 0:21:37 | 0:21:40 | |
I'm meant to be doing this. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:41 | |
There was a decree put out that journalists were not allowed | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
to leave Leopoldville. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
And then I thought, here I am, all this way out here in the Congo | 0:22:38 | 0:22:41 | |
and now I can't even leave out of the capital. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:44 | |
So, I had it in mind, and I knew that there were mercenaries | 0:22:44 | 0:22:47 | |
operating up in a place called Stanleyville. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:49 | |
I quickly managed to discover all this. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:51 | |
I've been appointed by Mr Tchombe | 0:22:51 | 0:22:52 | |
to recruit a number, which I can't disclose, | 0:22:52 | 0:22:55 | |
of men to form a fighting unit in the Congo, | 0:22:55 | 0:22:58 | |
to dispel the present rebellion. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:00 | |
"Mercenary" is a dirty word. | 0:23:00 | 0:23:02 | |
This unit is going to change the meaning of that word, | 0:23:02 | 0:23:04 | |
and "mercenary" will now be a badge of honour, | 0:23:04 | 0:23:08 | |
rather than a dirty word in the English language. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
I met one of these mercenaries, and his name was Alan Murphy. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
And I said, "Could you get me some information about this?" | 0:23:15 | 0:23:18 | |
And I pumped him for how to get there. | 0:23:18 | 0:23:20 | |
And he said, what happens was, every morning, | 0:23:20 | 0:23:23 | |
a C130 American plane, under the CIA, | 0:23:23 | 0:23:26 | |
would take groups of mercenaries to Stanleyville. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:31 | |
And I said, "Could you get me one of your shirts and a pair of trousers, | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
"and if I sleep overnight in the hotel, | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
"would you kick my bed in the morning when you get the call to leave?" | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
And he did just that. | 0:23:39 | 0:23:42 | |
And I see myself now, many, 40 years ago, standing on that runway | 0:23:42 | 0:23:47 | |
with the early-morning rain shower that had passed. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:50 | |
And a man with a clipboard, who happened to be a CIA man, | 0:23:50 | 0:23:53 | |
asking people's names. And I thought, I've had it. I've had it, you know. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:58 | |
Then he came up to me and he said, "What's your name?" | 0:23:58 | 0:24:01 | |
And I said, "McCullin." He said, "You're not on the list." | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
I said, "I should be," and my legs were like jelly. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:06 | |
And he said, he wrote my name down, he said, "OK, climb aboard." | 0:24:06 | 0:24:09 | |
And I'd cracked this amazing no-go situation. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:13 | |
When I arrived in Stanleyville, | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming, | 0:25:08 | 0:25:10 | |
people crying and gunfire. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:14 | |
And I saw gangs of boys who had been tied up, and they were being beaten | 0:25:14 | 0:25:18 | |
and shot in the back of the head and kicked into the river. | 0:25:18 | 0:25:21 | |
I was looking at all this. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:22 | |
I had my little camera in my bag, and 20 rolls of film. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:26 | |
And I thought, how am I going to bring my camera out now | 0:25:26 | 0:25:29 | |
and declare that I shouldn't be here and I'm not a mercenary? | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
Because it was a huge gamble. | 0:25:32 | 0:25:33 | |
And it was the Congolese gendarmerie who were killing these people, | 0:25:39 | 0:25:44 | |
torturing them, dragging them behind trucks on wires, | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
it was really terrible. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
They were skinned alive, some of them. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:51 | |
It was a kind of wood yard, and they were sitting in a corner, shivering. | 0:25:57 | 0:26:00 | |
Knowing that any moment, they would be shot. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:03 | |
And then they dragged some of these boys out in front of me | 0:26:06 | 0:26:09 | |
and started brutalising them. | 0:26:09 | 0:26:11 | |
And I had no power, by the way, to prevent this. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:15 | |
I took a few pictures and I walked away. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:20 | |
I thought, you know, you have a moral sense of purpose and duty. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:25 | |
You have to work out which of those purposes and duty you are there for. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:30 | |
It's very difficult too. | 0:26:30 | 0:26:32 | |
You want to take this picture, and you want to stop it. | 0:26:32 | 0:26:36 | |
And it's a very difficult thing. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:39 | |
It came up more and more my life, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:41 | |
seeing people executed in front of me. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:43 | |
GUNFIRE | 0:26:49 | 0:26:51 | |
RAPID GUNFIRE | 0:26:57 | 0:27:00 | |
There was a man called Mike Hoare | 0:27:00 | 0:27:03 | |
who was battling on the other side of this river, the Lualaba. | 0:27:03 | 0:27:06 | |
He was in charge of Fifth Commando, | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
these mercenaries I had teamed up with. | 0:27:10 | 0:27:12 | |
So, I arrived on the other side. | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
And then, Mike Hoare came to me and said, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:18 | |
"What are you doing, who are you? Where have you come from?" | 0:27:18 | 0:27:22 | |
And I said, "I have to be clean with you now, | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
"I'm working for the Observer newspaper." | 0:27:25 | 0:27:27 | |
He wouldn't have understood the German magazine, Quick. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:30 | |
I immediately fell back on my English heritage. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:34 | |
So, he said, "I'll deal with you in the morning, | 0:27:34 | 0:27:36 | |
"I'm going to hand you over to the Congolese military." | 0:27:36 | 0:27:39 | |
Which one knew right away, that would be curtains. | 0:27:39 | 0:27:44 | |
He said, "I admire what you have done, but I don't condone it." | 0:27:46 | 0:27:50 | |
And then he totally switched his whole kind of attitude | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
and offered to take me on this journey | 0:27:53 | 0:27:56 | |
chasing these Simbas who had abducted these nuns. | 0:27:56 | 0:28:00 | |
And they were cutting them to pieces with machetes on the way down, | 0:28:00 | 0:28:04 | |
as they were fleeing from us. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:05 | |
And we caught up with them. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:10 | |
There was goodness in Mike Hoare, | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
but there wasn't much goodness in what he stood for, really. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:28 | |
He was there for the adventure and the money. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:31 | |
There was one mercenary Rhodesian and I was sleeping in the same room | 0:28:42 | 0:28:46 | |
and he had a whole box of stuff and I said, "Where did you get that?" | 0:28:46 | 0:28:49 | |
He said, "I've just blown the bank in town but there was no money in it, unfortunately." | 0:28:49 | 0:28:54 | |
Halfway through the night, I heard gunfire | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
and I woke up in a great sweat. | 0:29:00 | 0:29:02 | |
This Rhodesian had got drunk and shot these two African boys, | 0:29:02 | 0:29:05 | |
who were doing all the laundry and the cooking | 0:29:05 | 0:29:07 | |
for these mercenaries for breakfast. | 0:29:07 | 0:29:10 | |
I remember looking at one of these poor black boys, | 0:29:10 | 0:29:13 | |
he was about 12 years old and his eyes were open. | 0:29:13 | 0:29:16 | |
And I looked at the mercenary and he said, "They asked for it. | 0:29:16 | 0:29:19 | |
"I found a weapon on them." Which wasn't true. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:23 | |
You know, some of these mercenaries, | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
they just had a lust for killing Africans. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:30 | |
HE MOANS | 0:29:30 | 0:29:32 | |
I hated them in the end. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:34 | |
GUNSHOT/HE SHOUTS | 0:29:35 | 0:29:37 | |
When I came away from these atrocities, I kept thinking, | 0:29:42 | 0:29:45 | |
"How am I going to get through this?" | 0:29:45 | 0:29:47 | |
I love what I'm doing, I love photography but, you know, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:50 | |
this other stuff is really too awful to live with, you know. | 0:29:50 | 0:29:54 | |
And sometimes people used to say to me, "Do you have nightmares?" | 0:29:54 | 0:29:57 | |
I would say, "No. | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
"Only in the daytime, when my eyes are open and I'm awake | 0:29:59 | 0:30:03 | |
"and my memory is, you know, on full alert." | 0:30:03 | 0:30:06 | |
So when I see... I love photography, | 0:30:06 | 0:30:11 | |
I love being in my darkroom, but even my darkroom is a haunted place. | 0:30:11 | 0:30:15 | |
I go in there with the red light and it's like being in a womb | 0:30:15 | 0:30:19 | |
and I play that music, which is only classical music, | 0:30:19 | 0:30:23 | |
it somehow pleases me, but at the same moment, | 0:30:23 | 0:30:28 | |
it takes me down and down and down to where I don't want to go. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
It's like as if I'm drowning in a very deep ocean... | 0:30:31 | 0:30:34 | |
..and I'm trying to get back to the top again to see the daylight. | 0:30:35 | 0:30:38 | |
So, you know, I don't just take photographs. I think. | 0:30:38 | 0:30:42 | |
CLASSICAL MUSIC | 0:30:42 | 0:30:44 | |
I would come back to Finsbury Park, | 0:31:10 | 0:31:12 | |
because unfortunately, | 0:31:12 | 0:31:14 | |
I was still living in quite poor circumstances with my new wife. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:18 | |
And then, when there were odd days when I had nothing to do, | 0:31:18 | 0:31:22 | |
I would go to the Wimpy bar and hang out with the same tribe, you know. | 0:31:22 | 0:31:26 | |
And then they would say, "Where have you been lately?" | 0:31:26 | 0:31:30 | |
I'd say, "I've been to the Congo with the mercenaries." | 0:31:30 | 0:31:33 | |
And they would try to humour me... | 0:31:33 | 0:31:35 | |
..but basically, they were almost putting me down, | 0:31:37 | 0:31:39 | |
as if I was living in a Walter Mitty world. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:42 | |
I did about four and a half years on the Observer | 0:31:48 | 0:31:51 | |
and things were beginning to slow down for me and I could also... | 0:31:51 | 0:31:55 | |
I started getting the taste and the need | 0:31:55 | 0:31:58 | |
to do much bigger, you know, international stories. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:01 | |
And a friend of mine called David King, | 0:32:02 | 0:32:06 | |
who worked at the Sunday Times, said to me, | 0:32:06 | 0:32:11 | |
"Why don't you come and join us? | 0:32:11 | 0:32:12 | |
"Why don't you come and do some work for us? I'll give you work." | 0:32:12 | 0:32:15 | |
So I did and he sent me off to the Mississippi. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:18 | |
BLUES MUSIC | 0:32:18 | 0:32:20 | |
It was an amazing part of the world, the Mississippi. | 0:32:31 | 0:32:35 | |
They had the sharecroppers, | 0:32:35 | 0:32:37 | |
the black people who brought in the cotton, | 0:32:37 | 0:32:39 | |
living in shacks and sheds, and then you had New Orleans, | 0:32:39 | 0:32:44 | |
where we basically, we arrived in New Orleans and it was amazing to see. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:50 | |
And there was a Ku Klux Klan rally one night. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:08 | |
It was like Hollywood. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:10 | |
There was the big fire cross burning, | 0:33:10 | 0:33:12 | |
these rather hateful people in these ridiculous kind of outfits, | 0:33:12 | 0:33:15 | |
smoking huge cigars and basically | 0:33:15 | 0:33:17 | |
saying, "Welcome," but, you know, at the same time intimidating us. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:24 | |
I managed to, you know, get a few pictures, which David King, | 0:33:26 | 0:33:29 | |
when I came back, put together. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:32 | |
You know, you can take amazing pictures, | 0:33:32 | 0:33:35 | |
but you still need to have them presented | 0:33:35 | 0:33:37 | |
in a way that the public can accept them and understand them. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:41 | |
That was my first assignment for the Sunday Times. | 0:33:42 | 0:33:45 | |
Roy Thompson was not a journalist himself, | 0:34:02 | 0:34:05 | |
but he was the best friend journalism ever had. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:09 | |
He was very proud of his newspapers | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
and he was so proud of their independence, | 0:34:12 | 0:34:14 | |
he had a card printed which he carried in his pocket. | 0:34:14 | 0:34:18 | |
So when Roy Thompson was attacked, | 0:34:18 | 0:34:21 | |
"Why are you papers publishing this?" | 0:34:21 | 0:34:22 | |
or, "Why are you putting these war photographs in the colour magazine? | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
"We advertisers don't like it." | 0:34:25 | 0:34:28 | |
He would pause and take out of his pocket a little card | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
and it said, it was a kind of oath he'd made, you know, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:35 | |
"The newspapers that I control will always be independent | 0:34:35 | 0:34:40 | |
"and will run professionally and I do not interfere in them." | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
So he would put the card back in his pocket and would say, | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
"You wouldn't expect me to go against my own word, would you?" | 0:34:47 | 0:34:51 | |
I was very privileged because I worked on the colour magazine, | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
which was directly associated with the Sunday Times newspaper. | 0:34:54 | 0:34:59 | |
And I had equally wonderful people there | 0:34:59 | 0:35:02 | |
who allowed me to just disappear and come back several weeks later | 0:35:02 | 0:35:07 | |
and on top of all that, allow me to edit my own material. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
He knew he had the confidence that if he did his part | 0:35:10 | 0:35:14 | |
and took his photographs and reported with integrity | 0:35:14 | 0:35:18 | |
and accuracy and with a sense of composition, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:21 | |
that it wasn't going to be interfered with | 0:35:21 | 0:35:24 | |
or rejected because of some other concerns. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
He trusted me and so it meant that I would try that much harder | 0:35:27 | 0:35:32 | |
for people who gave me this wonderful freedom. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:34 | |
So Roy Thomson, backing his editors, | 0:35:34 | 0:35:38 | |
was crucial to the career of Don McCullin. | 0:35:38 | 0:35:41 | |
MUSIC: "Tin Soldier" by The Small Faces | 0:35:41 | 0:35:43 | |
The '60s were packed with opportunities | 0:35:58 | 0:36:00 | |
if you wanted to go to war. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:02 | |
# I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire... # | 0:36:06 | 0:36:12 | |
Israeli soldiers, fresh from street fighting, | 0:36:17 | 0:36:19 | |
snapped one another at the Wailing Wall. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:21 | |
Pictures for girlfriends, or people from Tel Aviv. | 0:36:21 | 0:36:24 | |
# All I need is treat me like a man | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
# Cos I ain't no child... # | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
If they think that I've come back happy, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:33 | |
they know that I've got something ghastly to show. | 0:36:33 | 0:36:37 | |
And if I've got something ghastly to show, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:40 | |
it means that I'm trying to get the message over to people | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
that even though I like being in a war and I like being there | 0:36:43 | 0:36:47 | |
because it's a great adventure for me, | 0:36:47 | 0:36:49 | |
my duty is to be there for a reason, not just to have a bloody good time. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:53 | |
I covered the battle of the citadel of Hue, | 0:36:53 | 0:36:56 | |
which was the biggest battle I'd ever been in. | 0:36:56 | 0:36:58 | |
I mean, I wouldn't like to go through a year without being in a war. | 0:36:58 | 0:37:01 | |
And it went on for two weeks | 0:37:01 | 0:37:03 | |
and that was really the beginning of real madness. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:08 | |
I'm getting a bit bad, really, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:10 | |
because I'm looking forward to doing two wars a year | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
and if I start looking forward to doing two or even more a year, | 0:37:13 | 0:37:16 | |
I'm not going to survive. | 0:37:16 | 0:37:18 | |
CLASSICAL MUSIC | 0:37:22 | 0:37:24 | |
GUNFIRE | 0:37:25 | 0:37:27 | |
Sleeping next to dead bodies. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:04 | |
Looking at men who had been run over by tanks | 0:38:04 | 0:38:07 | |
and looked like Persian carpets in the road. | 0:38:07 | 0:38:10 | |
People with their brains hanging out. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:13 | |
Living under tables and sleeping in rat-infested rooms. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:18 | |
It was like, basically, going into total madness and insanity. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:23 | |
I stood for two weeks in that battle, | 0:38:25 | 0:38:28 | |
watching dozens and dozens of American soldiers being killed | 0:38:28 | 0:38:31 | |
and wounded and being dragged towards me. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:33 | |
They looked as if they'd been taken from a butcher's shop, with blood everywhere. | 0:38:33 | 0:38:37 | |
In the end, I became totally mad, free, | 0:38:37 | 0:38:41 | |
running around like a tormented animal. | 0:38:41 | 0:38:43 | |
CLASSICAL MUSIC | 0:38:43 | 0:38:45 | |
I've got to make sure that when they look at my pictures, | 0:38:51 | 0:38:54 | |
if it's on a Sunday morning after breakfast, | 0:38:54 | 0:38:57 | |
that it's going to hit them hard. | 0:38:57 | 0:38:59 | |
The very first man I saw in that Battle of Hue | 0:39:11 | 0:39:14 | |
had been hit in the face with two bullets. | 0:39:14 | 0:39:17 | |
And he had a bandage around him. | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
It looked like a child who had his porridge dripping down his face, | 0:39:19 | 0:39:24 | |
through this bandage, but in fact it was blood and not porridge. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:27 | |
Big, gooey chunks of human gore, just coming out of his face. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:32 | |
I put my camera up to my face | 0:39:32 | 0:39:35 | |
and he tried to move his head, this soldier, | 0:39:35 | 0:39:38 | |
but his eyes were screaming at me not to photograph him, | 0:39:38 | 0:39:41 | |
so I took my camera and went somewhere else. | 0:39:41 | 0:39:44 | |
There was no shortage of, you know, human flesh to photograph that day. | 0:39:44 | 0:39:48 | |
Our most vivid memory of the battle | 0:39:55 | 0:39:57 | |
was that it was one of the most intense battles of the Vietnam War. | 0:39:57 | 0:40:02 | |
Don came in and joined us and he just kind of showed up, | 0:40:04 | 0:40:09 | |
but what was unique about Don is that the other correspondents | 0:40:09 | 0:40:14 | |
and photographers would show up and, what I would say, snap and go. | 0:40:14 | 0:40:19 | |
They would take their pictures and then be out of there. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:22 | |
Don, for whatever the reason, decided to join with us, | 0:40:22 | 0:40:26 | |
stay with us and for several days, he became one of us. | 0:40:26 | 0:40:31 | |
On one occasion, on more than one occasion, | 0:40:32 | 0:40:34 | |
went out at great risk to himself | 0:40:34 | 0:40:38 | |
to assist with bringing some of our wounded casualties back | 0:40:38 | 0:40:43 | |
to where we could evacuate them. | 0:40:43 | 0:40:45 | |
His classic photo of the shell-shocked Marine | 0:40:47 | 0:40:51 | |
is a Delta Company Marine. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:55 | |
I dropped on my knees and photographed this man. | 0:40:55 | 0:40:59 | |
I shot five frames, each one singularly. | 0:40:59 | 0:41:03 | |
One, two, three, four, five. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:06 | |
There is not one blink of an eyelid. There's not one change. | 0:41:08 | 0:41:11 | |
All those negatives are exactly the same. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:14 | |
I have kept up with a sizeable number | 0:41:15 | 0:41:18 | |
of the Marines from Delta Company. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
We get together periodically and that individual has not surfaced, | 0:41:20 | 0:41:26 | |
so I don't know his history from that day on. | 0:41:26 | 0:41:30 | |
PIANO MUSIC | 0:41:35 | 0:41:37 | |
DISTANT GUNFIRE | 0:41:48 | 0:41:50 | |
I photographed this giant American | 0:42:02 | 0:42:04 | |
who looked like an athlete, but he was throwing a hand grenade. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:08 | |
Within seconds, this sniper hit this soldier in the hand | 0:42:08 | 0:42:12 | |
and he had a hand like a cauliflower. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:15 | |
It was all busted and bursting open. | 0:42:15 | 0:42:17 | |
The picture itself almost defeats the anti-war feeling | 0:42:19 | 0:42:23 | |
that I was trying to put across, | 0:42:23 | 0:42:26 | |
because he looks the picture of manhood, | 0:42:26 | 0:42:28 | |
like a javelin thrower at an Olympic event. | 0:42:28 | 0:42:30 | |
Instead of that, | 0:42:30 | 0:42:32 | |
he was throwing a hand grenade which was meant to bring death to others. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:37 | |
DISTANT GUNFIRE | 0:42:39 | 0:42:41 | |
The one meaningful picture I took in that battle | 0:42:55 | 0:42:58 | |
was a man who had been hit in both legs, an American Marine. | 0:42:58 | 0:43:03 | |
He was being supported by two friends | 0:43:03 | 0:43:05 | |
and if ever I thought, at the very moment in my atheistic kind of mind, | 0:43:05 | 0:43:10 | |
that I was looking at something purely religious, was of this man, | 0:43:10 | 0:43:14 | |
who looked like Jesus Christ being taken down from the cross. | 0:43:14 | 0:43:18 | |
When it was over, about 50% of the Marines were casualties. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:31 | |
In my own case, I went in with a company of 120 Marines | 0:43:33 | 0:43:38 | |
and sailors and at the end of the battle, | 0:43:38 | 0:43:41 | |
there were 39 of us that were still standing. | 0:43:41 | 0:43:44 | |
So you can see from just those shots how chaotic it was. | 0:43:47 | 0:43:54 | |
After two weeks, I got back to the press centre in Da Nang | 0:43:58 | 0:44:02 | |
and I realised I hadn't taken my clothes off, my underwear, | 0:44:02 | 0:44:05 | |
anything off for two weeks. | 0:44:05 | 0:44:07 | |
And, you know, I had a beard and I was haunted-looking. | 0:44:08 | 0:44:11 | |
I took those clothes off and threw them straight into the waste bin, | 0:44:11 | 0:44:14 | |
my underwear and everything I stood in, and had a shower. | 0:44:14 | 0:44:17 | |
I think I could have easily broke down in that shower and cried, | 0:44:20 | 0:44:24 | |
you know, I was so... | 0:44:24 | 0:44:27 | |
..so drained and used and crushed by two weeks of seeing people dying. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:33 | |
And you know, I think what I'm trying to say here is trying to be honest. | 0:44:34 | 0:44:39 | |
You know, photography suddenly didn't come into the picture, even. | 0:44:39 | 0:44:44 | |
It had nothing to do with photography. | 0:44:44 | 0:44:47 | |
After a while, if you are that involved in that kind of situation, | 0:44:47 | 0:44:52 | |
it's not about photography, it's about humanity. | 0:44:52 | 0:44:55 | |
Still photographs do have this strong affinity | 0:44:55 | 0:44:58 | |
with the way we remember, so... | 0:44:58 | 0:45:01 | |
And the vibrations of a still photograph can be intense | 0:45:01 | 0:45:05 | |
and can last for ever. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
I can remember that Don sometimes worries, | 0:45:08 | 0:45:12 | |
I know, about, "Have I taken these risks? Is it worthwhile?" | 0:45:12 | 0:45:18 | |
I can tell him it is | 0:45:18 | 0:45:20 | |
because nobody can trace...it's like throwing a stone in a pond. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:25 | |
The ripples go out and you can't say, | 0:45:25 | 0:45:27 | |
"This ripple was caused by this stone," but they are. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:31 | |
And I think the disenchantment with the Vietnam War in America | 0:45:31 | 0:45:34 | |
is powerfully reinforced by some of the photographers, | 0:45:34 | 0:45:37 | |
American photographers, including Don McCullin. | 0:45:37 | 0:45:42 | |
Photography is the truth if it is being handled by a truthful person | 0:45:42 | 0:45:48 | |
and I have to tell you that I have a lot of integrity. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:51 | |
I would never tell a lie. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:53 | |
I would never try to recreate something that wasn't real. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:57 | |
I did a picture once where I did recreate something. | 0:45:57 | 0:46:00 | |
It was the only time I ever did it, | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
but I saw some Americans looting the body of a dead soldier, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:07 | |
looking for souvenirs and mocking the body, mocking the person. | 0:46:07 | 0:46:11 | |
And when they went away, | 0:46:11 | 0:46:13 | |
having rifled all through his personal things, | 0:46:13 | 0:46:15 | |
I brought them together and made a kind of montage | 0:46:15 | 0:46:18 | |
of this pathetic possessions of this North Vietnamese soldier. | 0:46:18 | 0:46:22 | |
It's the only time I've ever done it, | 0:46:23 | 0:46:25 | |
but I thought I would make a statement for this soldier. | 0:46:25 | 0:46:28 | |
I have no shame about doing that. | 0:46:28 | 0:46:30 | |
I have this picture and I think it says what I was trying to make it say, that, you know, | 0:46:32 | 0:46:36 | |
"Hear me. I am just a victim of war." | 0:46:36 | 0:46:41 | |
I was trying to say this about this young man. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:44 | |
We had total freedom in Vietnam. | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
That, of course, made the Americans feel, | 0:46:52 | 0:46:56 | |
when the war finally came to an end, | 0:46:56 | 0:46:59 | |
that it was the media that let them down. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
They felt a bit upset about that, because they had given us | 0:47:02 | 0:47:06 | |
every facility and all they got in exchange was, you know, | 0:47:06 | 0:47:09 | |
that public opinion turned against the war in Vietnam. | 0:47:09 | 0:47:14 | |
So if you go to Afghanistan now, you are totally controlled. | 0:47:15 | 0:47:20 | |
They are never going to be allowed to take the kind of photographs | 0:47:20 | 0:47:23 | |
I did in Vietnam of the real thing, the battle, the price of war | 0:47:23 | 0:47:29 | |
and the suffering and loss, so the whole rulebook has been rewritten. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:36 | |
And it doesn't come out in our favour. | 0:47:36 | 0:47:39 | |
You just said it's a rotten job | 0:47:44 | 0:47:46 | |
and yet you have, in fact, sought it out. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:49 | |
You've sought out war and famine and misery | 0:47:49 | 0:47:52 | |
in all the time I've known you, which has been a long, long time. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:55 | |
Yes, I did it because I thought it was just going to be soldiers, | 0:47:55 | 0:47:58 | |
and then when I got to war, | 0:47:58 | 0:47:59 | |
I thought it was amazingly exciting to lay under | 0:47:59 | 0:48:02 | |
a barrage of shells dropping on me, or a sniper trying to get me. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:05 | |
I thought, you know, that was a challenge, | 0:48:05 | 0:48:07 | |
and I have swum around with many dead bodies in canals | 0:48:07 | 0:48:10 | |
to get by them when the sniper is working a ridge for me. | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
I felt I wanted to put my fingers up and say, "You missed it, mate." | 0:48:13 | 0:48:17 | |
And, you know, I had a very cocky attitude about warfare, | 0:48:17 | 0:48:20 | |
but then I started coming in contact with the real victims | 0:48:20 | 0:48:25 | |
and they are always the poor people who are not informed. | 0:48:25 | 0:48:27 | |
They don't have the Mercedes-Benz to get away. | 0:48:27 | 0:48:30 | |
They don't have the communication or the money to move off quick. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:33 | |
They are always the very poorest people who get clobbered. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:37 | |
And the amazing thing is that is where I started in my life, | 0:48:37 | 0:48:40 | |
living with poor people, | 0:48:40 | 0:48:42 | |
and when I am with them in those circumstances, | 0:48:42 | 0:48:45 | |
I have a very close affinity and understanding of what their lot is. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:49 | |
# I presume you never noticed | 0:48:51 | 0:48:55 | |
# How much I really cared... # | 0:48:57 | 0:49:02 | |
You are friends, aren't you? | 0:49:02 | 0:49:03 | |
-You are buddies, aren't you? -Well, we're all buddies. | 0:49:03 | 0:49:07 | |
Can you look where my elbow is? | 0:49:10 | 0:49:12 | |
I want to see your face, if you don't mind. That's fine. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:16 | |
You're OK, aren't you? You don't mind? You don't mind me? | 0:49:16 | 0:49:20 | |
I'm not bullying you around, am I? OK, thanks. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:24 | |
I don't want to take liberties, you know. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:26 | |
I could have spent the rest of my life working | 0:49:35 | 0:49:37 | |
in Aldgate and Whitechapel, it's all there. | 0:49:37 | 0:49:40 | |
Photographically, it's all there. | 0:49:40 | 0:49:43 | |
It is a totally, what do they call it... | 0:49:44 | 0:49:47 | |
..Hogarthian kind of experience, when you are doing these pictures. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:55 | |
PIANO MUSIC | 0:49:57 | 0:49:59 | |
This is one of my favourite pictures and I've never, | 0:50:08 | 0:50:10 | |
ever printed it before. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:12 | |
Look at these men's hands. | 0:50:12 | 0:50:14 | |
They are all standing up asleep, these men. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
These people used to try and put the dead eye on you. | 0:50:29 | 0:50:32 | |
By that, they would try to stare you out. | 0:50:32 | 0:50:34 | |
You must never flinch away like that. You must stare them out. | 0:50:34 | 0:50:38 | |
This is a woman called Jean. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:43 | |
She used to hang out under the arches of Liverpool Street Station. | 0:50:43 | 0:50:47 | |
She used to curtsey when I went up. | 0:50:48 | 0:50:50 | |
She used to say, "Hello, Captain Mark." | 0:50:50 | 0:50:52 | |
I said, "Why do you keep calling me Captain Mark?" | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
And she said, "Because you look like Captain Mark Phillips." | 0:50:55 | 0:50:58 | |
She said, "Would you like some tea?" | 0:50:58 | 0:51:00 | |
And I said, "You haven't got any milk." | 0:51:00 | 0:51:02 | |
She said, "I can always get it outside of people's front doors." | 0:51:02 | 0:51:05 | |
I loved her. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:08 | |
In fact, what I did, I found her somewhere to live. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:10 | |
This is a picture I really like. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:15 | |
It's like a fallen woman from the turn of the century. | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
I did this in Chapel Market on Sunday morning when I was very young. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:23 | |
She's been a posh woman, this woman. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:25 | |
You can tell by the handbag, tell by the clothes. | 0:51:25 | 0:51:28 | |
They're all young, now. They are not old people like this. | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
I think one of the best portraits I ever did | 0:51:42 | 0:51:44 | |
was this man in Spitalfields Market. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:46 | |
He was actually lying by the embers of an all-night fire | 0:51:46 | 0:51:49 | |
that these homeless men used to congregate around. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:52 | |
He sat up and looked at me full-face. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
I just held his stare and I just brought my Nikon camera up | 0:51:55 | 0:51:58 | |
to my eye and took this picture and he never moved an eyelid. | 0:51:58 | 0:52:01 | |
I was looking at the bluest eyes you've ever seen | 0:52:01 | 0:52:04 | |
and his hair was matted. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:06 | |
I felt as if I was looking at one of those Neptune images | 0:52:06 | 0:52:10 | |
of a man under the sea, you know, with a trident. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:14 | |
It was quite extraordinary. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:16 | |
So pleased with the picture. | 0:52:18 | 0:52:20 | |
MUSIC: "Blue Peter Theme" | 0:52:24 | 0:52:27 | |
This year it's a matter of life and death. | 0:52:27 | 0:52:30 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:52:30 | 0:52:32 | |
There has been a war going on in West Africa for two years now. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
It's a civil war between the Biafrans and the Nigerians. | 0:52:35 | 0:52:38 | |
We're not going to say which side is right or which side is wrong, | 0:52:38 | 0:52:43 | |
except that all war is always wrong. | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
I went two or three times. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:14 | |
Aeroplanes that used to take in aid | 0:53:14 | 0:53:17 | |
used to land on an extended road, which was their airstrip. | 0:53:17 | 0:53:21 | |
It was called Uli Airstrip and you went at night | 0:53:21 | 0:53:24 | |
and the Federal Government had hired, | 0:53:24 | 0:53:26 | |
you know, Russian pilots and foreign pilots | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
to try and shoot these planes down. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
This one is flying the other side of the mission church, | 0:53:31 | 0:53:34 | |
sweeping to the right. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:35 | |
Streaking the ground as they move, | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
dropping incendiary bombs and fragmentation bombs | 0:53:38 | 0:53:40 | |
in the places around here. | 0:53:40 | 0:53:42 | |
So, going in to Uli Airstrip at night was a very hairy experience. | 0:53:44 | 0:53:49 | |
There are crews out there willing to fly, despite the lack of permission | 0:53:49 | 0:53:54 | |
and we will just try and fly in. | 0:53:54 | 0:53:57 | |
-But you stand a good chance of being shot down? -I don't think so, no. | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
They seem to have been fairly trigger-happy in the past, though. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:05 | |
Anyway, we are going to try and let us see. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:08 | |
Ms Ryder, why are you going as well? | 0:54:08 | 0:54:11 | |
Well, because one feels very concerned, clearly, | 0:54:12 | 0:54:16 | |
with anyone who is suffering any distress anywhere | 0:54:16 | 0:54:20 | |
and partly because one has seen a situation in Europe, | 0:54:20 | 0:54:25 | |
in the past, perhaps similar to this. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:29 | |
PIANO MUSIC | 0:54:29 | 0:54:32 | |
I walked into a camp which was actually an old school building | 0:54:51 | 0:54:54 | |
and there were 800 dying children, standing there, waiting for me. | 0:54:54 | 0:54:58 | |
You know, when you go into a camp with 800 dying children, | 0:55:01 | 0:55:04 | |
some of whom are actually dropping down and dying in front of me, | 0:55:04 | 0:55:08 | |
they think you're coming with some form of salvation. | 0:55:08 | 0:55:12 | |
They don't realise you're coming to take pictures and get information. | 0:55:12 | 0:55:16 | |
That's not what they want. You know, they want food. | 0:55:16 | 0:55:20 | |
I saw this particular boy that haunts me to this day. | 0:55:35 | 0:55:39 | |
He was an albino boy and he was standing, looking at me. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:41 | |
Barely managing to stand on his spindly legs. | 0:55:41 | 0:55:44 | |
When you're an albino in Africa, | 0:55:44 | 0:55:47 | |
you're singled out all the time for bullying and God knows what. | 0:55:47 | 0:55:50 | |
He was clutching a French corned beef tin, | 0:55:50 | 0:55:53 | |
some previous aid gift which he'd licked the interior completely dry. | 0:55:53 | 0:55:57 | |
And I thought, "I can't look at this boy." It was too much. | 0:55:57 | 0:56:00 | |
He was staring at me, so I went somewhere else | 0:56:00 | 0:56:03 | |
and spoke to a doctor, cos another child had collapsed | 0:56:03 | 0:56:07 | |
and was dying and suddenly, somebody touched my hand | 0:56:07 | 0:56:10 | |
and I looked down and it was the albino boy, he was holding my hand. | 0:56:10 | 0:56:14 | |
And I thought, "Why are you doing this to me?" | 0:56:14 | 0:56:16 | |
It was like he'd honed in on me and he was really paining me, | 0:56:16 | 0:56:20 | |
making me feel so ashamed. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:23 | |
So I gave him a barley sugar from my pocket and he went away | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
and he stood at a distance, licking this barley sugar. | 0:56:26 | 0:56:30 | |
There were children of two years old, | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
crawling around on their stomachs with their anus hanging out. | 0:56:33 | 0:56:37 | |
I've never seen anything so terrible in all my life, | 0:56:37 | 0:56:41 | |
the inside of their whole backside | 0:56:41 | 0:56:44 | |
had kind of invertedly kind of suddenly fell out | 0:56:44 | 0:56:48 | |
and they were dragging themselves around | 0:56:48 | 0:56:51 | |
with this inside-out situation of their bottoms, | 0:56:51 | 0:56:53 | |
with flies hanging on as they crawled. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
I thought, this was worse than any inferno of insanity | 0:56:56 | 0:57:00 | |
that you could ever experience or see in your life. | 0:57:00 | 0:57:03 | |
It wasn't real, it was so horrible, so shocking. | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
And, you know, I almost become, well, I almost became paralysed. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:12 | |
I was so shocked. | 0:57:12 | 0:57:14 | |
I thought, "Take your mind off it. Take some pictures." | 0:57:14 | 0:57:18 | |
They said, "There's a girl you must see." | 0:57:18 | 0:57:21 | |
They said, "Her name is Patience." | 0:57:21 | 0:57:24 | |
They brought her in and she was completely naked. | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
She was 16 years of age, | 0:57:27 | 0:57:29 | |
days, if not one or two days, away from death. | 0:57:29 | 0:57:32 | |
And I thought, "How am I going to do this?" | 0:57:32 | 0:57:34 | |
And they sat her down and I asked the nurse | 0:57:34 | 0:57:39 | |
if she would place her hands over the lower part of her body, | 0:57:39 | 0:57:44 | |
cos I thought, you know, | 0:57:44 | 0:57:46 | |
"If I'm going to do this picture | 0:57:46 | 0:57:47 | |
"to show this terrible, shocking creature, | 0:57:47 | 0:57:49 | |
"I'm going to do it with as much dignity as I can rustle up | 0:57:49 | 0:57:53 | |
"and at least not take advantage of her nakedness." | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
You've never seen a more dignified person, you know, | 0:58:02 | 0:58:05 | |
you know, inches away from death. | 0:58:05 | 0:58:07 | |
PIANO MUSIC | 0:58:08 | 0:58:11 | |
And I remember one day seeing a woman trying to feed a child at the breast. | 0:58:17 | 0:58:22 | |
There was nothing for the child at the breast. | 0:58:22 | 0:58:26 | |
And I saw some writing at the back, in the far distance. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:29 | |
And after I'd photographed the woman, who, believe it or not, | 0:58:29 | 0:58:33 | |
was only 24 years of age and she looked like 65, | 0:58:33 | 0:58:36 | |
I went and read the writing in the far distance on the wall | 0:58:36 | 0:58:39 | |
and it had on the wall, "Today I am reborn." | 0:58:39 | 0:58:43 | |
And that little inscription took my legs away from me. | 0:58:47 | 0:58:53 | |
You know, you can go through so much as a photographer, | 0:58:53 | 0:58:55 | |
you put yourself there. | 0:58:55 | 0:58:58 | |
You don't ask, you know, you don't ask why you are there. | 0:58:58 | 0:59:01 | |
You go there and the same time you put yourself there. | 0:59:01 | 0:59:04 | |
You could refuse if you want. | 0:59:04 | 0:59:06 | |
I went there, but when I went there, I photographed these people | 0:59:06 | 0:59:09 | |
to show they had more dignity than most of us will ever dream of, | 0:59:09 | 0:59:14 | |
that being in the last throes of their life. | 0:59:14 | 0:59:16 | |
His awareness of the futility of it, | 0:59:28 | 0:59:32 | |
as well as the direct sight of these people dying on their feet... | 0:59:32 | 0:59:39 | |
..moved him enormously. | 0:59:41 | 0:59:43 | |
He always had empathy, of course, | 0:59:43 | 0:59:45 | |
with the soldier who was shot, but here he was looking at civilians. | 0:59:45 | 0:59:49 | |
Men and women without any clue about what was going on, | 0:59:49 | 0:59:53 | |
dying because of the ambitions | 0:59:53 | 0:59:55 | |
of some of the power-hungry people in the country. | 0:59:55 | 0:59:58 | |
MUSIC: "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd | 1:00:00 | 1:00:04 | |
# If I leave here tomorrow | 1:00:18 | 1:00:24 | |
# Would you still remember me? | 1:00:26 | 1:00:29 | |
# I must be travelling on now... # | 1:00:33 | 1:00:39 | |
I spent my whole life travelling the world. I was really on the move. | 1:00:40 | 1:00:44 | |
You know, I was constantly at London Airport | 1:00:51 | 1:00:54 | |
and waving goodbye to my little family. | 1:00:54 | 1:00:57 | |
# And this bird shall never change... # | 1:00:58 | 1:01:01 | |
I was very eager, as always, | 1:01:09 | 1:01:11 | |
and ambitious to get to the front of the fighting. | 1:01:11 | 1:01:14 | |
And the next thing I know, | 1:01:14 | 1:01:16 | |
we walked into an ambush and all hell broke loose. | 1:01:16 | 1:01:18 | |
GUNFIRE | 1:01:18 | 1:01:20 | |
There was tremendous, heavy AK-47 fire. | 1:01:20 | 1:01:25 | |
And I immediately ran down into the side of the road, | 1:01:25 | 1:01:28 | |
which is like a culvert. | 1:01:28 | 1:01:30 | |
And I thought, "I'm going to get my tail out of here." | 1:01:34 | 1:01:37 | |
Because, you know, what does one picture mean of a soldier under fire | 1:01:37 | 1:01:40 | |
if it's going to cost you your life? | 1:01:40 | 1:01:42 | |
For the first time, my nerve went. | 1:01:42 | 1:01:45 | |
I knelt behind a tube and there was an almighty explosion. | 1:01:45 | 1:01:47 | |
I was blown across the road. | 1:01:47 | 1:01:49 | |
I felt this terrible burning sensation in my legs | 1:01:49 | 1:01:52 | |
and everywhere from the waist downwards. | 1:01:52 | 1:01:54 | |
And all my past seemed to come before me and I thought, "This is it. I'm going to die." | 1:01:54 | 1:01:58 | |
So I crawled away for about 200 yards, | 1:01:58 | 1:02:01 | |
only to be put on the back of a truck, | 1:02:01 | 1:02:03 | |
having been stabbed with a morphine injection. | 1:02:03 | 1:02:05 | |
And then they filled the lorry up | 1:02:05 | 1:02:07 | |
with about half a dozen soldiers who were wounded. | 1:02:07 | 1:02:10 | |
I thought, "I'm going to take my mind off my own pain | 1:02:10 | 1:02:13 | |
"and I'm going to photograph what's going on in this truck." | 1:02:13 | 1:02:16 | |
They put the man on the truck right next to me | 1:02:17 | 1:02:20 | |
who took the full brunt of the mortar bomb that hit me, | 1:02:20 | 1:02:23 | |
but he got, unfortunately, all of it in his chest and stomach. | 1:02:23 | 1:02:26 | |
And he kept sitting up and trying to fight people holding him down. | 1:02:26 | 1:02:30 | |
He was fighting. | 1:02:30 | 1:02:32 | |
And he died on the way back in the truck to the hospital, | 1:02:32 | 1:02:35 | |
because I sat up and photographed him. | 1:02:35 | 1:02:37 | |
And I said, "I don't want you to take any more risks." | 1:02:37 | 1:02:41 | |
They took the risks as they judged fit | 1:02:41 | 1:02:44 | |
because they were independently-minded. | 1:02:44 | 1:02:47 | |
And I secretly rejoiced that they brought back what they did, | 1:02:47 | 1:02:50 | |
but nonetheless, the next time and the next time | 1:02:50 | 1:02:54 | |
and the next time, you thought, | 1:02:54 | 1:02:56 | |
"Pray to God that they are not playing Russian roulette with their own lives." | 1:02:56 | 1:03:01 | |
LOUD EXPLOSION | 1:03:08 | 1:03:10 | |
It was strange for me to get on an aeroplane and fly to Belfast, | 1:03:14 | 1:03:18 | |
drive to Londonderry, check into the hotel. | 1:03:18 | 1:03:22 | |
And you could guarantee that once the pubs turned out | 1:03:23 | 1:03:25 | |
at about 3-something in the afternoon, | 1:03:25 | 1:03:27 | |
that there you braced yourself | 1:03:27 | 1:03:29 | |
and you knew exactly where it would be. | 1:03:29 | 1:03:31 | |
It was almost like a football match. You knew where the action would be. | 1:03:31 | 1:03:35 | |
SHOUTING AND SCREAMING | 1:03:35 | 1:03:37 | |
It was bricks and bottles and stones | 1:03:37 | 1:03:40 | |
coming at the soldiers, who then fired rubber bullets | 1:03:40 | 1:03:43 | |
and CS gas back, and I used to be gassed on a regular basis. | 1:03:43 | 1:03:48 | |
But from a photographer's point of view, you couldn't miss. | 1:03:48 | 1:03:51 | |
It was like a theatre, really. It was like a play. | 1:04:01 | 1:04:04 | |
You knew the plot, you'd seen it many times before. | 1:04:04 | 1:04:08 | |
This particular day, I knew they were going to charge | 1:04:29 | 1:04:33 | |
and I was standing there with my short telephoto lens | 1:04:33 | 1:04:36 | |
and I took this picture of the "let's go and get them". | 1:04:36 | 1:04:39 | |
I wasn't totally aware that in the shop doorway by this taxi company | 1:04:41 | 1:04:45 | |
was a woman standing there, holding her mouth with total shock. | 1:04:45 | 1:04:49 | |
That made my picture much more poignant, really. | 1:04:51 | 1:04:54 | |
I came upon this highway | 1:05:22 | 1:05:24 | |
and saw these dying soldiers in the road, and I was with a very | 1:05:24 | 1:05:28 | |
nice friend of mine called Michael Nicholson, who was an ITV reporter. | 1:05:28 | 1:05:32 | |
Their wounds were kind of melting into the tar itself on the road. | 1:05:32 | 1:05:36 | |
So hot. | 1:05:36 | 1:05:38 | |
We prised them off the road and we draped them | 1:05:38 | 1:05:41 | |
across the bonnet of his Jeep. | 1:05:41 | 1:05:44 | |
And I stood on the front of it and kind of leaned on them | 1:05:44 | 1:05:46 | |
and we drove them back to a first aid medical centre for the army. | 1:05:46 | 1:05:51 | |
And we went back the next morning to see how they were, but they had died. | 1:05:51 | 1:05:55 | |
And I did lots of pictures of men coming in on that road | 1:06:03 | 1:06:07 | |
with pieces of cardboard around their feet, | 1:06:07 | 1:06:09 | |
because they threw their boots away | 1:06:09 | 1:06:12 | |
and, of course, they didn't last long on that road. | 1:06:12 | 1:06:14 | |
The whole thing was the most appalling shambles. | 1:06:17 | 1:06:20 | |
It was like the retreat from Moscow. Terrible disarray. | 1:06:20 | 1:06:23 | |
And so, when the Sunday Times published these pictures, | 1:06:26 | 1:06:29 | |
the South Vietnamese Government put me on a blacklist, | 1:06:29 | 1:06:33 | |
which I never thought for one minute existed. | 1:06:33 | 1:06:35 | |
I was building this reputation as a war photographer, | 1:06:39 | 1:06:42 | |
which today I really detest. | 1:06:42 | 1:06:44 | |
I worked for it and then, | 1:06:44 | 1:06:46 | |
when I suddenly felt that I was being acclaimed as a war photographer, | 1:06:46 | 1:06:50 | |
suddenly I felt uncomfortable and dirty. | 1:06:50 | 1:06:53 | |
I felt being called a war photographer | 1:06:53 | 1:06:55 | |
was like being called a mercenary. | 1:06:55 | 1:06:57 | |
Looking back on all that, I thought my family suffered very badly. | 1:07:08 | 1:07:12 | |
I was always waving goodbye to them and one wonders in their mind, | 1:07:12 | 1:07:15 | |
were they ever thinking, "Will we ever see this strange man again, | 1:07:15 | 1:07:19 | |
"who is supposed to be our father?" | 1:07:19 | 1:07:21 | |
But, you know, I didn't want to weaken my strength | 1:07:23 | 1:07:26 | |
by thinking in a sentimental way. | 1:07:26 | 1:07:29 | |
I wanted to do my job and then hopefully go home to them, | 1:07:29 | 1:07:33 | |
but it was very selfish, now I look back on it. | 1:07:33 | 1:07:36 | |
And it eventually ruined by marriage. | 1:07:36 | 1:07:38 | |
GUNFIRE | 1:08:09 | 1:08:11 | |
In Beirut's Christian stronghold, | 1:08:13 | 1:08:16 | |
Phalangist militiamen poured fire on neighbouring areas | 1:08:16 | 1:08:21 | |
held by Muslim leftists | 1:08:21 | 1:08:23 | |
and allies from the more extreme Palestinian guerrilla group. | 1:08:23 | 1:08:26 | |
Every day you had a twist in the Lebanon. | 1:08:26 | 1:08:29 | |
There is always something ghastly and new to kind of look at. | 1:08:29 | 1:08:34 | |
I did this photograph of all these Christians, | 1:08:34 | 1:08:37 | |
all proudly showing their manly side to them. | 1:08:37 | 1:08:40 | |
And the audacity was that they were wearing Christian crosses | 1:08:41 | 1:08:46 | |
and, you know, you think... | 1:08:46 | 1:08:48 | |
you expect more from Christianity | 1:08:48 | 1:08:52 | |
if you're displaying it in such a way than some of the terrible things | 1:08:52 | 1:08:55 | |
that they did in the name of Christianity. | 1:08:55 | 1:08:58 | |
On the political front, the situation still appears to be stalemate. | 1:08:58 | 1:09:02 | |
Efforts to implement a ceasefire clearly having failed | 1:09:02 | 1:09:05 | |
and parliament's attempts to hold a session... | 1:09:05 | 1:09:08 | |
The Palestinian areas, the kind of east side of Beirut, | 1:09:08 | 1:09:12 | |
right inside the Christian heartland. | 1:09:12 | 1:09:16 | |
And it was just, it was murder from the word go. | 1:09:17 | 1:09:23 | |
MUSIC | 1:09:23 | 1:09:25 | |
They started, you know, collecting prisoners. | 1:09:29 | 1:09:33 | |
It all happened so quickly. | 1:09:33 | 1:09:34 | |
I went to a house where I could hear a lot of women and children screaming. | 1:09:36 | 1:09:40 | |
A Christian was bringing the women and children down | 1:09:40 | 1:09:42 | |
the side of this stairwell and I could see two Palestinian young men | 1:09:42 | 1:09:47 | |
with their hands up, in the left-hand side of the stairwell. | 1:09:47 | 1:09:51 | |
The moment the women went out of the house, | 1:09:53 | 1:09:57 | |
the man next to me, and I was very close, you know, | 1:09:57 | 1:10:00 | |
very close, started opening up and killing these people in cold blood, immediately. | 1:10:00 | 1:10:04 | |
And they went down in a hail of bullets and blood, all up the wall. | 1:10:04 | 1:10:08 | |
And I went round the back of the stairwell, another stairwell, | 1:10:10 | 1:10:13 | |
and try to get a grip of myself, cos I was so shocked. | 1:10:13 | 1:10:16 | |
I couldn't believe what I had just seen. | 1:10:16 | 1:10:18 | |
I came out of the building | 1:10:19 | 1:10:21 | |
and there was another Christian gunman who had the women and children | 1:10:21 | 1:10:24 | |
and he said, "By the way, if I see you taking any pictures, | 1:10:24 | 1:10:27 | |
"I am going to kill you myself. Get out of here." | 1:10:27 | 1:10:30 | |
Everywhere I went that day, | 1:10:33 | 1:10:35 | |
I could see another person being murdered in front of me. | 1:10:35 | 1:10:38 | |
Of course, what I did eventually was get the picture of the man | 1:10:38 | 1:10:42 | |
playing the lute over the dead Palestinian girl's body. | 1:10:42 | 1:10:45 | |
They were so angry about it when it was published that they said | 1:10:49 | 1:10:53 | |
if they ever caught the man who took the picture, they would kill him. | 1:10:53 | 1:10:57 | |
In a way, it was almost an honour | 1:11:02 | 1:11:04 | |
that they wanted to kill me for taking the picture. | 1:11:04 | 1:11:06 | |
The 26-storey Holiday Inn is burning. | 1:11:11 | 1:11:13 | |
The third of a trio of five-star hotels | 1:11:13 | 1:11:16 | |
to be caught in the firing line. | 1:11:16 | 1:11:18 | |
This is the courtyard of the Hilton Hotel | 1:11:18 | 1:11:20 | |
and it was here that the fighting took place all last night. | 1:11:20 | 1:11:24 | |
When the Islamics overwhelmed part of the Christian area where I was, | 1:11:24 | 1:11:31 | |
they were actually ensconced in the Hilton Hotel and when they got in, | 1:11:31 | 1:11:36 | |
the Christians that they'd captured in there, | 1:11:36 | 1:11:38 | |
they took them to the top floor and they mutilated them | 1:11:38 | 1:11:41 | |
in a manly sense, by cutting off part of them, and they threw them, | 1:11:41 | 1:11:46 | |
alive, off the top of the building. | 1:11:46 | 1:11:48 | |
When it gets down to that kind of hatred, | 1:11:50 | 1:11:53 | |
it becomes a form of insanity. | 1:11:53 | 1:11:56 | |
It goes beyond your understanding of anything. Anything. | 1:11:56 | 1:12:01 | |
I don't know how he did it. He had a very sensitive conscience. | 1:12:09 | 1:12:13 | |
I would often call him "the conscience with a camera". | 1:12:13 | 1:12:16 | |
He had a very sensitive feel for other people's suffering, | 1:12:16 | 1:12:21 | |
which also gave him the impetus to feel, | 1:12:21 | 1:12:25 | |
"I can make people wake up to what is really going on here". | 1:12:25 | 1:12:29 | |
So the sensitivity which might have made him | 1:12:29 | 1:12:32 | |
recoil from the images was allied to this conscience of his which says, | 1:12:32 | 1:12:37 | |
"I've got to get this story. It can only be told by photographs." | 1:12:37 | 1:12:41 | |
His journalism, which is best when that cold eye of his, | 1:12:41 | 1:12:47 | |
if you like, was informed by the warmth of his empathy, | 1:12:47 | 1:12:52 | |
and by the text, which amplified the image which you could see. | 1:12:52 | 1:12:57 | |
It's an awful question to ask you, but do you think the images you take | 1:12:57 | 1:13:00 | |
of horror, of war, actually make anybody change their mind about it? | 1:13:00 | 1:13:04 | |
Actually, to be honest, I don't think they have. | 1:13:04 | 1:13:07 | |
I've been photographing war for about 16 years | 1:13:07 | 1:13:09 | |
and I've got very disillusioned. | 1:13:09 | 1:13:11 | |
And I've just had an exhibition | 1:13:11 | 1:13:14 | |
and the exhibition was mostly attended by very young people | 1:13:14 | 1:13:17 | |
and judging by the letters that I have received, which were many, | 1:13:17 | 1:13:20 | |
the people who wrote to me were very young people | 1:13:20 | 1:13:23 | |
and they are the people who care about war. | 1:13:23 | 1:13:25 | |
I think the rest of us, the middle-aged, | 1:13:25 | 1:13:27 | |
I hate to say this, people, they've had war and they've had enough of it. | 1:13:27 | 1:13:32 | |
I think they are sick about hearing about it now. | 1:13:32 | 1:13:35 | |
They think there is no solution, but the young people, | 1:13:35 | 1:13:37 | |
who are tomorrow's people, | 1:13:37 | 1:13:39 | |
they are more interested about trying to do something about it. | 1:13:39 | 1:13:42 | |
They feel ashamed of it and can't understand it. | 1:13:42 | 1:13:45 | |
I mean, why don't you settle for the easy life and earn 500 quid | 1:13:45 | 1:13:48 | |
a day taking pictures of ladies wearing bras and things? | 1:13:48 | 1:13:51 | |
-Or not wearing bras? -I would probably get a heart attack. | 1:13:51 | 1:13:55 | |
LAUGHTER | 1:13:55 | 1:13:57 | |
Did you like this one? The sulky lover? | 1:13:58 | 1:14:00 | |
You would be if you had a face like that against you. | 1:14:02 | 1:14:04 | |
THEY LAUGH | 1:14:04 | 1:14:06 | |
This is one of my favourite pictures. I don't have many favourites. | 1:14:09 | 1:14:13 | |
It's a classic example of intrusion, of course, | 1:14:13 | 1:14:16 | |
but it's just showing the English. | 1:14:16 | 1:14:19 | |
The deckchairs says it all, doesn't it? | 1:14:19 | 1:14:22 | |
One thing about England, you can guarantee to find | 1:14:22 | 1:14:25 | |
all kinds of kind of crazy people in the summer. | 1:14:25 | 1:14:28 | |
There's not, I don't think there is a country quite like this country | 1:14:30 | 1:14:34 | |
for the diversities of people's manifestations. | 1:14:34 | 1:14:37 | |
You know, eccentrics. | 1:14:37 | 1:14:38 | |
You can get them by the bus-load here in England. I love it. | 1:14:38 | 1:14:41 | |
MUSIC: "This Is England" by The Clash | 1:14:41 | 1:14:43 | |
# I hear a gang fire on a human factory farm | 1:14:43 | 1:14:47 | |
# Are they howling out or doing somebody harm? | 1:14:47 | 1:14:51 | |
# On a catwalk jungle somebody grabbed my arm | 1:14:54 | 1:14:58 | |
# A voice spoke so cold, it matched the weapon in her palm | 1:15:00 | 1:15:04 | |
# This is England | 1:15:07 | 1:15:09 | |
# This knife of Sheffield steel | 1:15:09 | 1:15:12 | |
# This is England | 1:15:12 | 1:15:15 | |
# This is how we feel | 1:15:15 | 1:15:18 | |
# This is England... # | 1:15:34 | 1:15:38 | |
When the print unions sabotaged the Sunday Times, | 1:15:59 | 1:16:02 | |
they basically killed the paper. | 1:16:02 | 1:16:04 | |
The Thomson Organisation said, "We can't go on like this. | 1:16:04 | 1:16:07 | |
"We can't have the paper wrecked not only physically but economically." | 1:16:07 | 1:16:12 | |
So they put the paper up for sale. | 1:16:12 | 1:16:15 | |
And they had a perception, a judgement, | 1:16:17 | 1:16:19 | |
that Rupert Murdoch, with his history of being pretty tough, | 1:16:19 | 1:16:24 | |
would be better able to control the print unions. | 1:16:24 | 1:16:27 | |
And in some respects, that was a fair judgement. | 1:16:28 | 1:16:32 | |
You've had enough photographs. I think we really... | 1:16:32 | 1:16:34 | |
-And with Mr Evans. -Mr Evans. | 1:16:34 | 1:16:36 | |
And though he made promises about the papers would maintain | 1:16:36 | 1:16:41 | |
their independence, he did not keep them. | 1:16:41 | 1:16:44 | |
And this, of course, was very, very bad news for British journalism | 1:16:44 | 1:16:50 | |
but it was also bad news, individually, for Don McCullin. | 1:16:50 | 1:16:54 | |
When Murdoch took over the Sunday Times | 1:16:54 | 1:16:56 | |
and Harold Evans went over to the Times newspaper, | 1:16:56 | 1:16:59 | |
we all felt that, you know, we were looking at the beginning of the end. | 1:16:59 | 1:17:03 | |
And I had had 18 fantastic years there. | 1:17:03 | 1:17:07 | |
The precious independence that he'd had and the ability to go | 1:17:07 | 1:17:12 | |
and tell an unvarnished truth through the medium of film | 1:17:12 | 1:17:16 | |
was now at risk, and so it proved to be. | 1:17:16 | 1:17:20 | |
MUSIC | 1:17:26 | 1:17:29 | |
The Falklands War suddenly appeared on the horizon and I thought, | 1:17:43 | 1:17:46 | |
"I want to be in on this, because for the first time in my life, | 1:17:46 | 1:17:51 | |
"I'm going to be in a big, international war with British soldiers." | 1:17:51 | 1:17:55 | |
You know, I thought I was the natural person | 1:17:55 | 1:17:58 | |
and to my astonishment, I was barred. | 1:17:58 | 1:18:00 | |
It didn't happen. | 1:18:00 | 1:18:03 | |
I was left behind and I was utterly miserable and devastated. | 1:18:03 | 1:18:08 | |
It was an appalling decision to keep Don McCullin off the boat, | 1:18:10 | 1:18:14 | |
creating the excuse that boat was full. | 1:18:14 | 1:18:17 | |
It seemed to be saying, "Your photography is so honest, | 1:18:19 | 1:18:23 | |
"so searing, so implicit with meaning, we can't take the risk | 1:18:23 | 1:18:27 | |
"of you accessing freedom of expression." | 1:18:27 | 1:18:31 | |
I thought it was the most appalling decision | 1:18:31 | 1:18:34 | |
and its effect on him was to seem to say, | 1:18:34 | 1:18:37 | |
"You've spent your life documenting things | 1:18:37 | 1:18:40 | |
"we don't think you should ever have documented," | 1:18:40 | 1:18:43 | |
which, of course, was saying, "Why have you bothered? | 1:18:43 | 1:18:48 | |
"Why have you bothered to risk your life to try and tell the truth?" | 1:18:48 | 1:18:52 | |
That's the reason I went back to Lebanon, | 1:18:56 | 1:18:59 | |
because I didn't go to the Falklands. | 1:18:59 | 1:19:01 | |
The Lebanon War was erupting at the same time. | 1:19:01 | 1:19:04 | |
Cos, you know, I can always go somewhere else. | 1:19:04 | 1:19:07 | |
If I couldn't go to this war, I could go to another war, you know. | 1:19:07 | 1:19:09 | |
Cos I was suffering from what you become, a war junkie, really. | 1:19:09 | 1:19:14 | |
I was suffering from that problem, you know. | 1:19:14 | 1:19:16 | |
The massacres were carried out by an elite special security formation | 1:19:16 | 1:19:22 | |
of the Lebanese Christian Phalange. | 1:19:22 | 1:19:25 | |
The operation was, at all stages, | 1:19:25 | 1:19:28 | |
under direct control of senior Phalange commanders. | 1:19:28 | 1:19:31 | |
During that early stage of the massacre at Shatila Camp, | 1:19:31 | 1:19:34 | |
the Israeli forces fired a constant barrage of flares | 1:19:34 | 1:19:40 | |
to light up the camp for the Phalange forces. | 1:19:40 | 1:19:43 | |
CLASSICAL MUSIC | 1:19:44 | 1:19:46 | |
One morning in the hotel, very early, | 1:20:43 | 1:20:45 | |
I had a call from someone saying, "Are you Mr McCullin?" I said yes. | 1:20:45 | 1:20:49 | |
They said, "Will you come down to the lobby? | 1:20:49 | 1:20:52 | |
"We want to take you to the hospital at Sabra and Shatila." | 1:20:52 | 1:20:56 | |
They said, "About 21 people have been killed in this hospital, | 1:20:58 | 1:21:01 | |
"but we are not interested in that. | 1:21:01 | 1:21:03 | |
"We want to show you the worst aspect of what has happened here today." | 1:21:03 | 1:21:07 | |
They took me upstairs to the children's department | 1:21:07 | 1:21:10 | |
of the insane side of the hospital | 1:21:10 | 1:21:13 | |
and to my astonishment, there was one nurse who had stayed | 1:21:13 | 1:21:16 | |
for five days during this shelling and the others had fled the hospital. | 1:21:16 | 1:21:20 | |
And she showed me around and I couldn't believe | 1:21:25 | 1:21:28 | |
what I was looking at. | 1:21:28 | 1:21:30 | |
She said, "We've had to tie the children to the beds," | 1:21:30 | 1:21:33 | |
she said, "because we couldn't cope. | 1:21:33 | 1:21:35 | |
"They would have got away and been injured." | 1:21:35 | 1:21:38 | |
And there were children tied to the beds, | 1:21:38 | 1:21:40 | |
covered in flies, in a heat you wouldn't understand. | 1:21:40 | 1:21:43 | |
So these children were lying in buckets of their own filth, | 1:21:45 | 1:21:48 | |
starving hungry, dying of thirst. | 1:21:48 | 1:21:50 | |
MUSIC | 1:21:52 | 1:21:54 | |
And she said, "There is a room with more children. | 1:22:06 | 1:22:09 | |
"I've had to lock them in the room and they are blind and insane," | 1:22:09 | 1:22:13 | |
and she said, "They're only two years old, some of them." | 1:22:13 | 1:22:17 | |
And she opened the door of this room | 1:22:17 | 1:22:19 | |
and the heat that came out of it, you could've roasted a chicken in it. | 1:22:19 | 1:22:23 | |
And out swam, in their own filth and mess, | 1:22:23 | 1:22:26 | |
they were like blind rats, these children. | 1:22:26 | 1:22:29 | |
I don't think I was ever more ashamed of humanity. | 1:22:32 | 1:22:35 | |
I thought, "If this is what people can do in the name of, you know, | 1:22:35 | 1:22:40 | |
"Christianity or whatever, you know..." | 1:22:40 | 1:22:43 | |
Because the war was being conducted against the Christians, | 1:22:43 | 1:22:46 | |
or the Christians were fighting back and the Jews were shelling, | 1:22:46 | 1:22:51 | |
I mean, the whole thing was about religious madness. | 1:22:51 | 1:22:55 | |
Who was paying the price? | 1:22:55 | 1:22:57 | |
I wandered away. I was in deep shock and I thought, "I'm confused, here. | 1:22:57 | 1:23:02 | |
"Why am I here? What has this got to do with my original concept of being a photographer?" | 1:23:02 | 1:23:09 | |
And I wandered into another room just to get away | 1:23:12 | 1:23:15 | |
from all this horrible, horrible stuff. | 1:23:15 | 1:23:18 | |
And I saw a child sitting, | 1:23:18 | 1:23:20 | |
playing with bits of debris as if he had Lego. | 1:23:20 | 1:23:24 | |
I think it was a day of reckoning for me, | 1:23:29 | 1:23:32 | |
because I don't think I could have ever touched on more tragedy, | 1:23:32 | 1:23:35 | |
all under one roof, than what I saw at that hospital that day. | 1:23:35 | 1:23:38 | |
I've never forgotten it. | 1:23:38 | 1:23:40 | |
The sad thing about these days that I never forget | 1:23:47 | 1:23:50 | |
is that they come back, on a regular basis, | 1:23:50 | 1:23:54 | |
as fresh as it was happening today, to haunt me. | 1:23:54 | 1:23:57 | |
There is nothing so powerful as reporting. | 1:24:08 | 1:24:11 | |
The government can't find out the things that reporters can. | 1:24:11 | 1:24:15 | |
Certainly, many governments wish to suppress | 1:24:15 | 1:24:18 | |
what can be found out, foreign governments and sometimes our own. | 1:24:18 | 1:24:22 | |
So this is a very, | 1:24:22 | 1:24:24 | |
very important quality of Don's impulses, | 1:24:24 | 1:24:28 | |
which is the passion to report what is happening | 1:24:28 | 1:24:32 | |
and insofar as that has diminished today, | 1:24:32 | 1:24:35 | |
we've lost a huge amount | 1:24:35 | 1:24:37 | |
and I think there is still a tremendous appetite | 1:24:37 | 1:24:40 | |
for really good photojournalism, really good reporting. | 1:24:40 | 1:24:43 | |
Mr Rupert Murdoch, on budget day, | 1:24:44 | 1:24:47 | |
asked me to resign as Editor of the Times. I refused. | 1:24:47 | 1:24:51 | |
At no time have the independent | 1:24:52 | 1:24:54 | |
national directors sought my resignation. | 1:24:54 | 1:24:57 | |
But in the circumstances, the differences between me | 1:25:00 | 1:25:03 | |
and Mr Murdoch should not be prolonged. | 1:25:03 | 1:25:05 | |
I am therefore resigning tonight as the Editor of the Times. | 1:25:06 | 1:25:11 | |
The reason I got pushed out of the Sunday Times was simple, actually. | 1:25:11 | 1:25:15 | |
They had brought a new editor in. | 1:25:15 | 1:25:16 | |
A man called Andrew Neil, who was very ambitious, | 1:25:16 | 1:25:19 | |
and quite, you know, he knew what he wanted. | 1:25:19 | 1:25:22 | |
Most new editors like to kick off with a new bunch of people | 1:25:22 | 1:25:26 | |
under them, but he did say that there would be no more | 1:25:26 | 1:25:30 | |
wars in the magazine and in fact, it would be a magazine | 1:25:30 | 1:25:33 | |
based on life and leisure, you know, to attract the ads. | 1:25:33 | 1:25:38 | |
So I was one of the first casualties, | 1:25:38 | 1:25:42 | |
because when I went and photographed wars and Africa | 1:25:42 | 1:25:45 | |
and dying and starving children, | 1:25:45 | 1:25:47 | |
I was going to make sure that I got the strongest images. | 1:25:47 | 1:25:52 | |
They didn't always sit well in a magazine | 1:25:52 | 1:25:54 | |
that was trying to sell you, you know, cars and luxury. | 1:25:54 | 1:25:58 | |
So I was definitely on the way out by that stage. | 1:25:58 | 1:26:01 | |
I asked him about the occasion he was invited to | 1:26:30 | 1:26:32 | |
an execution in Saigon and as I recall, | 1:26:32 | 1:26:36 | |
he went to the prison where the execution was going to take place | 1:26:36 | 1:26:39 | |
and turned back and refused to take the photograph. | 1:26:39 | 1:26:43 | |
It was because of his really powerful humanitarian impulses, | 1:26:43 | 1:26:47 | |
he didn't want to legitimise murder in any way. | 1:26:47 | 1:26:51 | |
Since, actually, his entire canon of photography | 1:26:51 | 1:26:55 | |
is to delegitimise violence and say, | 1:26:55 | 1:26:58 | |
"Look, these are the consequences of your political decision. | 1:26:58 | 1:27:02 | |
"These are the consequences of your greed. | 1:27:02 | 1:27:05 | |
"These are the consequences of your carelessness. | 1:27:05 | 1:27:08 | |
"Look on these and think again." | 1:27:08 | 1:27:10 | |
I think his entire impulse, a humanitarian photographer | 1:27:10 | 1:27:15 | |
with tremendous technical skill, amounting to genius, in my view. | 1:27:15 | 1:27:20 | |
MUSIC | 1:27:22 | 1:27:24 | |
I'm nearly 75 years of age now. | 1:27:27 | 1:27:29 | |
I still have some energy left, not a lot, | 1:27:29 | 1:27:33 | |
but I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate, | 1:27:33 | 1:27:37 | |
you know, the things we've been talking about. | 1:27:37 | 1:27:40 | |
I'm just going to photograph the landscape, | 1:27:40 | 1:27:42 | |
and the English landscape, to me, is my heaven. | 1:27:42 | 1:27:46 | |
My form of heaven. | 1:27:46 | 1:27:48 | |
The one thing that upsets me about it is, like all other things, | 1:27:50 | 1:27:54 | |
there is always a threat surrounding the things you love. | 1:27:54 | 1:27:57 | |
When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, you know, | 1:27:57 | 1:28:00 | |
I think a tree is dying. | 1:28:00 | 1:28:02 | |
When I hear shooting, when there is pheasant shooting, | 1:28:02 | 1:28:05 | |
I think there's going to be some blood somewhere. | 1:28:05 | 1:28:08 | |
The sound of gunfire immediately switches on | 1:28:08 | 1:28:11 | |
another part of my nervous system. | 1:28:11 | 1:28:14 | |
So I feel, as much as you try to run away from these things, | 1:28:18 | 1:28:22 | |
someone always presses a button and says, you know, | 1:28:22 | 1:28:25 | |
"Here is a reminder of, you know, what you used to do." | 1:28:25 | 1:28:29 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:31:14 | 1:31:16 |