by Don McCullin
Don, 1956
I started looking over my shoulder at Finsbury Park with some suspicion, though not without affection. I didn’t feel disloyal to my roots but knew I was in a precarious situation, neither wholly in one world nor the other. Both could be unforgiving. I was frightened of mixing with intellectual journalists and was becoming aware that a photographer’s status was well below that of a writer. I instinctively rebelled against such attitudes, and despite a strong sense of widening horizons my feelings were confused.
Two newspapermen did a great deal for my confidence in those early days. Philip Jones Griffiths, himself a great photo-journalist, introduced me to the Pentax camera, and I bought one secondhand, downgrading the Rolleicord which rested tranquilly on the chest. The new toy was light, could be held at eye-level, and would take different lenses. The Observer writer John Gale teased me to live as close to the edge as he did. One stormy night we were together covering a Channel swim when he dared me to join him in the water that had been declared too dangerous for the competitors to enter. I can hear his great booming voice now—Guards and Sandhurst—urging me to follow him as he was lifted up and down by that vast, billowing sea, like some Wagnerian apparition bellowing into the night: ‘Come on in, McCullin, you fucking coward!’
For me, the real decision to live dangerously was taken in Paris, where I had gone with Christine to make up for our mundane honeymoon. Paris, after all, was the home of serious photo-journalism, with Paris-Match and the great agencies like Magnum, and so Paris could not be ignored if I was at all serious about my work. It all started with a Frenchman making a pass at my very pretty wife and receiving from me—as he would have done at Gray’s Academy in Finsbury Park—the offer of my fist and a mouthful of obscene threats, incomprehensible as they were to him. The scene reduced my poor wife to tears, and afterwards we sat in a cafe while I leafed glumly through the magazines. In one I came across a striking picture of Vopos (East German military) jumping over some barbed wire. It was the beginning of the Berlin crisis and the Wall. Suddenly I saw the direction in which my photography had to go. I said out loud: ‘I have absolutely got to go to Berlin.’
Christine, 1956
She did not flinch or complain, that wife of mine. Indeed I owe her an enormous debt of gratitude for encouraging my ideas. She always supported me—although she had no inkling as yet of how much her tolerance would be expected to bear in the coming years as I travelled further and further into danger, when often it must have seemed as if I were trying to commit suicide.
We cut short the second honeymoon and returned to London. I raced over to the Observer, to be told they were not interested in my going to Berlin. ‘Okay,’ I said to Denis Hackett, the editor on the desk, ‘but I’m going anyway. Tomorrow.’ My blood was up.
It took everything I had—£42 (a month’s earnings) for the ticket alone. I arrived in the divided city with a letter of introduction from a slightly relenting Hackett to the Observer’s correspondent and soon found myself in a grand ornate hotel in Berlin’s artist quarter, face to face with the flamboyant and vibrantly arrogant Patrick O’Donovan. He always wore a carnation and had a remarkable scar across his face, acquired (he later told me) when as a Guards officer in wartime he had unwisely stood up in his tank as it approached a wire strung across the road.
‘I’m going to show you Berlin,’ he said. ‘Are you interested?’
I was more than interested. I wasn’t about to refuse to hit the celebrated night spots of Berlin with one of the great newspapermen of the day, even if (as was then true) one pint of beer and I would be rocky. Besides, this was still le Carré’s Berlin, before the reconstruction, and still, underground, the Berlin of the Thirties. In one bar we found a naked lady riding round on a horse in a sawdust arena. We were asked to leave by a man in an ankle-length overcoat when Patrick became too eager to mount the same horse. So the night progressed—out of one bar and into the next.
When I collected Patrick next morning, he looked utterly untouched by the previous night’s debauch and sported a fresh carnation. We headed for the Friedrichstrasse, where the Wall was being built up, with breeze blocks. American soldiers, their machine guns at the ready, lurked in doorways, looking tense. I got out my Rolleicord and the little 35mm Pentax and started using them.
It was on the strength of those photographs of the Berlin Wall that I made my real breakthrough in Fleet Street, the Observer giving me a regular contract for two days a week at fifteen guineas. With this untold wealth I managed to buy for £1,300 a tiny cottage in Colney Hatch Lane, where my first son, Paul, was born a year later. Those Berlin pictures also won a British Press Award for the best series. I could feel ambition growing, the blood raging in a torrent round my body. I was like a prize-fighter, trained and on his toes, waiting only for the day of the big contest, wanting worldwide recognition. At the age of twenty-eight, and in a mood of macho exuberance, having been extravagantly puffed by the Observer’s picture editor in Camera magazine, I was ready for a big international assignment. When it came, shortly afterwards, I little knew how powerful an experience it would be.
Don and Christine at a party, London, 1958
Don with his painting of himself and Christine, Finsbury Park, 1956, by Philip Jones Griffiths
9. THE FIRST CONTEST
Cyprus was the contest I wanted. Though I felt less than sure of myself when I arrived at the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia and walked into the bar. I hadn’t encountered before the crowd who considered themselves the elite, the international press corps, and they certainly didn’t seem eager to encounter me. A few faces turned towards me expectantly and then abruptly turned away again. They were on the lookout for old cronies; newcomer nobodies with cameras round their necks were of no interest at all. I was relieved and grateful when one chap came over and said, ‘Just arrived?’ and started nannying me. Since I had been in Cyprus as a national serviceman a lot had happened and I was only dimly aware of most of it. Cyprus had got its independence and the Greek archbishop, Makarios, had become president. Relations between the Greeks and Turks had gone from bad to abysmal. British soldiers were still on the scene in large numbers, no longer as an arm of the imperial power but as mediators in the civil war. There had been many atrocities in the outlying Turkish villages and, my new friend thought, events were about to take an even nastier turn.
We chatted on for a bit before it suddenly became clear to me that my adviser had more than a professional interest in my welfare. He was homosexual. Nothing had prepared me for the possibility that such a masculine profession as that of war correspondent could harbour what, in those blinkered days, was regarded as sexual weakness. I would learn later that heterosexuals had no monopoly on ability, or courage, but at the time I cut our conversation short and sought other company.
I found it in a beanpole of a man called Donald Wise, a photographer for the Daily Mirror, and another nice chap called Ivan Yates from the Observer. Yates had been doing some articles on the Greek Orthodox Church when the conflict suddenly interrupted his pious researches and made him the man-on-the-spot. So it came about that I eventually rode into my first battle with an ecclesiastical correspondent.
The real war correspondents were all led off—as I was later to discover real war correspondents often are—for a guided tour of the island by air, all laid on by the RAF.
Ivan and I were left to our own devices. Nothing much seemed to be going on, which again I would learn often seems to be the case in trouble spots. There didn’t seem to be anything better to do than go and look up my old haunts around RAF Episcopi and Larnaca. Ivan had to be back for a dinner appointment, but he was keen to come along, if only to see the Temple of Apollo.
Around Limassol and Episcopi little could be seen except a lot of British paras on roofs keeping their eyes open. They had spotted Greeks mobilising and were worried that something might happen, but didn’t know what. We were on our way back thro
ugh the suburbs of Limassol, on schedule for Ivan’s dinner appointment, when it happened.
We were going through the Turkish quarter when we heard this terrific ‘braaaap, braaaap’.
‘The bloody exhaust has fallen off,’ I said, annoyed.
We got out of the car and went round the back, but the exhaust was in perfect condition. The noise I had heard was of two Bren guns firing across the top of the car.
‘Christ, Ivan, we’re in the middle of it.’
It was late afternoon, and we were deep in the Turkish quarter. I said to Ivan, ‘I want to stay here because it looks as if this is going to be it.’
American and East German border guards, Friedrichstrasse crossing, Berlin, 1961
I drove out to get Ivan a cab, and then came back to the same spot. As I parked the car, I saw a group of men with weapons crouched in the road. They wore old long British greatcoats and balaclava helmets. I went up and asked for the police station. They jumped on me, and I reached the police station under close arrest, with Turkish escort. After some hours of questioning the police released me and in the middle of the night took me to what had been a community centre and was now converted, because of the hostilities, into a hospital.
After some fitful sleep, I was woken early by a clanging noise. It proved to be a bullet hitting the iron grille of the window behind which I had been sleeping. Then it started in earnest and the firing grew heavier and heavier. The intensity of that hail of bullets was greater than anything I was prepared for. The reality of firepower exceeds almost anything that Hollywood dares to offer.
I was shaking with a combination of awe, fear and a kind of excitement. Though it wasn’t clear at the time, what had happened was that some 5,000 armed Greek irregulars had furtively surrounded this small Turkish quarter of Limassol and opened fire from corners and rooftops. The Turkish community had withdrawn for safety into communal buildings, and the Turks were mounting a counter-attack.
I went out into the middle of this gun battle and took shelter behind an armoured car, wrongly thinking it would give me protection. From this vantage point I took the picture that later aroused so much comment—of a Turkish gunman emerging at a run, his shadow sharply defined on a wall. I took risks that later I would never have taken. I was determined to face up to fear and defy it. As the battle moved I ran here, there and everywhere. I was wound up to an extreme pitch, feeling completely surrounded by this onslaught and weighted down with the responsibility of being the only pressman there to record what was going on and to convey it to the world. I ran from street to street, trying not to miss one significant thing, trying to get as close as possible, to carry myself into situations where reporters, and especially reporters with cameras, were never meant to be. Some shots I took when I was in the direct firing line of snipers.
It was a kind of madness. The battle lasted all day, and I felt I had lived a lifetime. In one street I saw a cinema, into which families had been put for safety, come under heavy fire. I saw people stumbling into the battle as you and I might do, going round the corner to the local shops. Some couldn’t register what was going on. An old woman got caught up in the crossfire, and fell. An old man, I suppose her husband, came out to help her, as though she had slipped with her shopping basket. She lay in a pool of her own blood, and he fell beside her from the same sniper bullets.
I saw women running with mattresses over their heads for protection from the bullets, as they might put on scarves to keep off rain.
I watched horrified as, under the duress of fire, one of the buildings disgorged its Turkish defenders and its occupants. Women and children also began to appear. I remember putting my cameras down and belting across the fire-field to retrieve a three-year-old whose mother was screaming, and carrying it to safety. In later years I would develop a principle about trying to put back into a situation from which I was taking. But there was no theory at work that day. It was all instinct.
Part of the cause of the Cyprus conflict, I sensed—and tried to capture it in that picture of the gunman—was nothing more than the Eastern Mediterranean, moustachioed, half-bandit undercurrent of vendetta, or what people called machismo. This touchy masculine pride and honour, pride in aggression and revenge, instantaneous reaction to a situation in which there were for the combatants only black and white, only emotional certainties, no grey questionable areas or matters calling for deliberation or understanding, was all acted out in the fierce heat of the sun.
Yet what remains with me even more strongly than that gun battle is my first quiet encounter with the carnage of war. It took place in a little Turkish village of stone and mud called Ayios Sozomenos, about fifteen miles from Nicosia. It was very still as I got out of my car on the village outskirts and saw shepherds herding their flocks away. I photographed an attractive young girl of about eighteen wearing a headscarf and carrying a double-barrelled shotgun. She held her head high as she was solemnly walking away. I could hear distant crying. And I could smell burning. I could sense there was death around. I heard voices and went towards them up a rise in the ground. Some British soldiers were standing by an armoured vehicle. I went up and said ‘Aye, aye’ as if I’d seen them after a country walk in Somerset.
‘Morning,’ one of the soldiers said. ‘Want to see a dead body, mate? There’s one over there. Been hit in the face with a shotgun. Not very pleasant.’
I thought, O Christ, am I going to be able to handle it?
I came to this man’s feet, which were splayed, and my eyes travelled up the length of his body to the face—what was left of it. I could see the dark brown eyes fixed in a stare, as if looking at the sky. I thought back to my father’s death. I thought, This is what it’s like. I thought, It is bad, but it’s not too bad for me to bear.
As I walked away the soldier said, ‘Oh, there’s two more in that house.’
I went to the stone house and knocked on the window. There was silence. I turned the handle and opened the door. The early morning cold syphoned out warm sticky air. It was a sticky carnage that I saw. The floor was covered with blood. A man was lying on his face, another flat on his back. There wasn’t a mark on him, or seemed to be none. There was no sound. I let myself in and closed the door. I could smell something burning. In another room I found a third man dead. Three men dead, a father and two sons, one in his early twenties, the other slightly older.
Suddenly the door opened and people came in led by what I later learned was the wife of the youngest man. They had been married only a few days. All the presents were laid out in the front room, all shot up in the gun battle. Broken cups and saucers, glass objects and ornaments, brought as gifts to the wedding.
I’m in serious trouble now, I thought. They will think I have trespassed in their house. I had already taken photographs. It wasn’t just trespass in the legal sense I had been guilty of, for I had trespassed on death, and emotion too. The woman picked up a towel to cover her husband’s face and started to cry.
I remember saying something awkward like—Forgive me, I’m from a newspaper, and I cannot believe what I am looking at.
I pointed to my hand with the camera in it, asking for an invitation to record the tragedy. An older man said, ‘Take your pictures, take your pictures.’ They wanted me to do it. I was to discover that all Middle Eastern people want to express and record their grief. Grief is something they express very vividly. It’s not just the Turks and Greeks, but a Mediterranean thing, a very outward display of mourning.
When I realised I had been given the go-ahead to photograph, I started composing my pictures in a very serious and dignified way. It was the first time I had pictured something of this immense significance and I felt as if I had a canvas in front of me and I was, stroke by stroke, applying the composition to a story that was telling itself. I was, I realised later, trying to photograph in a way that Goya painted or did his war sketches.
Eventually, the woman knelt do
wn by the side of her young husband and cradled his head. I was very young then, and I knew that pain, and I found it hard not to burst into tears. When I walked out of the house I was shattered. I was dehydrated. My mouth was glued together.
Turkish woman by her husband’s body, Cyprus, 1964
Turkish woman grieving for her dead husband, Cyprus, 1964
Turkish woman mourning the death of her husband, Cyprus, 1964
I think I grew up that day. I took a step away from my personal resentments, my feeling that life had been uniquely tough on me, giving me evacuation and Finsbury Park, and taking away my father when I was young. That day in Cyprus, when I saw somebody else losing a father, somebody else losing a son, I felt I could somehow assimilate this experience so that my own pity could cease to be personal and instead become general. And I could just say, ‘Okay, I’m not the only one.’
The next day, in another village, I photographed the family of a Turkish shepherd who had been shot in the hills. The poor shepherds were the soft targets of course. They were preparing a makeshift coffin and the dead shepherd’s son was looking on, a young boy about the age I was when they brought my own father’s body back from the hospital. With a curious ceremonial dignity they offered me the bullet that had passed through the shepherd’s body. Experiences like this were an ordeal, but I also felt as if they were a privilege. In an inexplicable way they were teaching me how to become a human being.
Cyprus left me with the beginnings of a self-knowledge, and the very beginning of what they call empathy. I found I was able to share other people’s emotional experiences, live with them silently, transmit them. I felt I had a particular vision that isolated and homed in on the essence of what was happening, and could see that essence in light, in tones, in details. That I had a powerful ability to communicate.