by Don McCullin
‘Hey, you guys, quieten down sharp over there.’
It had some effect but that was the tour on which my image of the iron German soldier collapsed.
Like most correspondents on the road I would eat in the officers’ mess of whichever American stockade I was passing through. These were dour places—plastic seating and red lights, with the bar as the main focus, but not a cheerful one. Human troughs of self-pity, these were the places to go if you wanted insight into the belligerence born of booze and firepower. You would see other officers holding maudlin, sad, peculiar conversations with imported Vietnamese women whom they called ‘hooch’ girls or ‘slopes’. These women would come in to serve them beers, and do their washing and possibly other things. They were widely believed also to report back to the Viet Cong.
Faith in firepower made the Americans oddly immune to the lessons of the past, and led them consistently to underrate the enemy. Dien Bien Phu, if it was recalled at all, was remembered as a French failure rather than as an extraordinary achievement of Vietminh arms, under General Giap’s leadership. The French artillery officer at Dien Bien Phu committed suicide in despair—he had said it was impossible for the enemy to bring such a weight of artillery through the jungle.
The scale of US presence reinforced overconfidence. Everything about the Americans in Vietnam, from the size of their soldiers to the mountainous contours of their ammo and garbage dumps, seemed to dwarf anything Asian. To those who wanted to believe in America’s global mission against Communism, it gave an impression of immovable solidity. To the doubters it increasingly spelt waste on a mega scale, waste of country, waste of lives and waste of spirit.
I read somewhere that Americans throw away enough food to feed fifty million people, and a fair bit was being pitched out in South-East Asia. Shortly after my third trip to Vietnam, I went to Bihar in North India and the contradictions in human society were inescapable. I moved from a situation where resources were being used on a massive scale to kill people to one where no resources were being put into keeping people alive.
Almost the entire province of Bihar—some fifty million people—was afflicted with famine. A failure of the monsoon rains had wiped out most of the rice harvest; and all the late crops—wheat, barley, vegetables—had simply not appeared. I did my work in Monaghyr, a village inhabited only by untouchables, where the autumn harvest had produced a tenth of its normal yield and the well had dried up.
No heroics are possible when you are photographing people who are starving. All I could do was to try and give the people caught up in this terrible disaster as much dignity as possible. There is a problem inside yourself, a sense of your own powerlessness, but it doesn’t do to let it take hold, when your job is to stir the conscience of others who can help.
13. FIRST THE LION, THEN VULTURES
I found it hard to settle back into life at the Observer after my first trips to the wars. A kind of restlessness swept over me, as if it were time to move on. Though I thought of the Observer as my newspaper, my home, its shoestring budget prevented the paper sending me on any but the rare foreign assignments. Usually I would go as a freelance for other publications, and once the main job was done, I would then produce more reports and pictures for the Observer. In this way the newspaper would benefit from inexpensive foreign coverage and I could do the kind of photo-journalism I wanted. The situation was hardly ideal.
Most of my Observer stories were domestics. I remember being dispatched to Dartmoor, not for a study in landscape but for pictures of the grim, remote penal settlement built there originally to house prisoners from the Napoleonic wars. While I was photographing the spectacle of too many of Britain’s most dangerous and hardened criminals locked up in one place, I noticed a young man waving at me furiously. I lowered the camera and saw that it was one of my old mates from Finsbury Park. If he was resentful at seeing me there as a visitor, rather than an inmate, he didn’t show it.
Other stories I found less rewarding, though triviality sometimes provided memorable moments. I was given a very firm and precise briefing for an assignment at a nudist camp near Sunningdale. This was in the days before the Sun page-three pictures, so you could say I was breaking fresh ground, though my pictures had to be decent enough for breakfast tables in quality-newspaper homes.
I was greeted on arrival by a voluble and voluptuous woman without a stitch on who kept saying in a very posh voice, ‘Why don’t you take your things off, you’ll feel much more comfortable.’ My excuse for staying clothed was that the Observer wanted these pictures very quickly. She became suddenly highly cooperative. ‘Now where would you like me?’ she called as she leapt up and down in the water, splashing it eagerly across her breasts. A line of naked bottoms, bosoms and protruding stomachs, and heads with baseball caps on, were queuing for the naked lunch. Beyond them people were playing volleyball, a most uncomfortable game when you haven’t got yourself strapped down. One persistent young man trailed me round the camp with the repeated advice ‘Come on, get ’em off’. Getting a usable picture of a man poling a punt, as I had been asked, was something of an achievement I thought. The volunteer kept his sandals on but was less adept at shielding the area that I knew could not be flaunted in a family newspaper. You couldn’t take the job any more seriously than a McGill postcard, and I felt I could do more important stories at far less personal risk.
My dissatisfaction with the Observer came to a head with the arrival of the colour magazine. There had been no great enthusiasm for it in the paper, but as the Sunday Times was beginning to taste success with theirs, after a bumpy start some while earlier, both the Observer and the Telegraph decided they had to bring out their own magazines to stay in the running. I was not among those who welcomed the development. I was happy with black and white: it was easier to use and often, to my mind, produced pictures with greater impact, though later I was to do some of my best work for a colour magazine.
Once the decision was taken, the Observer was faced with the need to import people who were good with colour—rare birds in those days, and mostly to be found in the fields of fashion or advertising, or else working for geographical magazines. Some of the assignments that I thought should have been mine went to this new crew. At the same time, my early patrons on the picture desk had moved on and the new picture editors tended to treat me as if I were some kid street photographer, only to be used in narrow circumstances. I left quietly at the end of 1965 and teamed up with the people on the Telegraph magazine. It was a terrible mistake. I left the slight assignments of the Observer for even slighter ones at the new paper. The only project I enjoyed was an exploration of the legend of King Arthur. This involved spending a lot of time in the West Country, an area I had come to love. I shot much of the wild forest material near Glastonbury in a sombre, haunting colour that seemed suited to legends. The feature was well received and repeatedly syndicated.
The Telegraph’s main contribution to my development was to cast me away on a desert island. The late John Anstey, the Telegraph’s reclusive magazine editor, thought it an amusing idea to abandon me and a young writer called Andrew Alexander on a tiny island in the Caribbean and to see how long it would take before we cried for help. They chose Necker, in the British Virgin Islands. It was an island about three-quarters of a mile long and half a mile wide, with a long hill running down the middle. It was inhabited by snakes, scorpions and tarantulas. The nearest outpost of civilisation was three miles away on Mosquito Island, where some Americans were building a hotel. We were allowed the clothes we stood up in, a pocket knife, a machete, fishing line and hooks, a limited supply of matches, iodine, a canvas sail (to catch rain)—all things a shipwrecked sailor might possess. A red flag was given to us to hoist should rescue be required. We also took two gallons of water to get started; the local doctor said we would need at least four pints a day.
We made ourselves a shack and called it, with rare premonition, the Chamber of Horrors. We
suffered severe heatstroke through building it energetically in the midday sun on the first day marooned. Word of this ludicrous adventure got round the islands and, after a couple of days, an American senator appeared in his speedboat and yelled, ‘Hi, you guys, how’s it going? Can I get you any goodies?’ It was the kind of encouragement we could have done without at that stage.
Andrew, who is well read and can play the piano, was at the opposite end of the personality spectrum to myself, but we got along all right, for a time at least. In the evenings we used to talk about great restaurants in Soho which, allied to the thirst, would make our tongues swell up to enormous size. Sleep was always a difficulty. The mosquitoes and other insects were more venomous and persistent than any I had encountered in Vietnam or the Congo. We often caught angel fish and trigger fish, which we would cook, wrapped in leaves, at the bottom of the fire. We supplemented this with prickly pears—lethal, as their name suggests, but at least moistening the mouth.
Water, indeed any kind of moisture, was the big problem. By the time we decided that coconuts were the answer, we were too weak to climb up the trees to get them. Cutting the trees down—there were only three coconut trees on the island—was against the rules. By the ninth day, we were down to half a pint of water between us. By the twelfth, there was just a mouthful each. Andrew tried chewing the inside of a cactus for moisture, but without any great success. After eight days he had written in his log, ‘We are getting sorry for ourselves and resolve to stop it. Don has all the Cockney’s special capacity for grumbling and I have a morbid taciturnity in these conditions which he must find very trying.’ More difficult for me to cope with was Andrew’s slight asthma. Stress would make him frighteningly breathless. While I griped, he became tense and short-tempered. Yet everything was done in slow motion because of our gathering weakness. All that accelerated was our squabbling, which we conducted through cracked lips that could barely move.
Out of temper, and out of water, we hoisted the red flag and were taken off in the early hours of the fifteenth day.
It was a phoney ordeal, but an ordeal none the less. We had each lost two stone in weight, and my medical report said: ‘He was in an extremely dehydrated condition . . . Mentally he was lethargic and depressed.’ We had disappointed ourselves: the newspaper thought we might be good for three weeks while we had it in mind to do four.
Then something happened to lift our spirits. Alex Low, the picture editor, decided he could do better. He cabled to London to the effect: ‘Pathetic show, Alexander and McCullin. Myself and local beachcomber willing to re-enact.’ These two jokers went out to the island, lost their cameras in the sea, chopped down one of the sacrosanct palm trees, and ran up the red flag—all in the space of three days. But no lasting damage was done by the enterprise. Andrew went on to become a distinguished political columnist, and I was eventually rescued by three old mates from the Observer who had since gone to the Sunday Times. One of the trio was the illustrator Roger Law, who later created the television series Spitting Image, but it was the designer Dave King who arranged for me to meet Sunday Times magazine art editor Michael Rand, and he who paired me with my old reporter friend Peter Dunn for my first assignment with the Sunday Times.
The Sunday Times had money, and was ready to spend it. Peter and I were dispatched on a slow swing through North America that would take us at least five weeks. Rarely before, even in war zones, had I been away for more than two. It is true the paper wanted value for money—four stories in all: a piece about the lives of merchant seamen, another about Cuban exiles in Miami, a big colour story on the Mississippi, and a gritty look at the Chicago police. Yet it showed confidence in the people they were sending. I liked that.
I had been to the States only briefly once before. I had been sent to New York by a German magazine to cover the Harlem riots of 1964 but arrived too late for a single rioter to be seen. This trip was to be different.
We left Glasgow on a 10,000-ton cargo ship on which I discovered long-distance drinking and seasickness. I remember Peter coming down to the cabin where I was lying uncertain if I was alive or dead and saying: ‘Where’re my new boots? I’m going to sort that little bugger out.’ Mercifully, we docked in Charleston before he found them. In any case, new boots would have been of little use in a fight with the Cuban exiles we met in Miami, where I got striking pictures of car boots full of machine guns. It was all said to be for the freedom struggle, but we weren’t so sure. I developed some respect for Fidel Castro, for the people he had chucked out all seemed to be hardened crooks.
New Orleans was a great town for hitting the jazz joints. From there we took a barge to Baton Rouge, in Louisiana, where Peter fell sick for a couple of days, giving me longer to respond to the Mississippi, a wonderful river—massive, cantankerous and uncontrollable. I photographed an old negro by the riverside who said, ‘Come down into the water, boy, and let me baptise you.’ A few miles upriver I spent the night photographing the Ku Klux Klan, with their white hoods and flaming crosses. Then we went to a cotton plantation where the big-bellied boss told us, ‘I do believe we treat our niggers very well on this estate.’
In Chicago the two detectives assigned as our escort took us to a basement area where the man in charge of the city morgue conducted us round the ‘Stink Room’. He showed us unclaimed derelicts—some fire victims, some killed in road accidents, and the corpses of many just found dead on the pavement. He lamented our missing a woman who had gone through a few days earlier. ‘You should have seen the tits on this dame.’ I did not regard it as a time for taking pictures. Whether it was the Chicago morgue, or the relief of finishing the assignment, or simply applying a new-found skill, I don’t know, but I arrived back at Heathrow somewhat pissed. I couldn’t even stand up, and some ambulance men came to prise me off the plane. I spent the next twelve hours sleeping it off in the airport sick bay.
Prisoner asking for water, Chicago jail, 1967
For me the Sunday Times was an opening into what became known later as the Swinging Sixties. Some of my friends became celebrities and celebrities became my collaborators and subjects, and sometimes my friends. I had moved the family to a semi-detached house of some style in Hampstead Garden Suburb, where one day I received a posse of Italian film makers who arrived in two large limos with expensive coats slung over their shoulders. In their midst was an older distinguished man with crinkly grey hair who turned out to be the great director Antonioni. He seemed a little surprised to find that fashionable London photographers lived modest lives with their families around them. I could see why when he outlined the plot of a film he was planning to make in England about a photographer who by chance finds evidence of a murder on one of his negatives. What little of it was true to life seemed to have little connection with mine. Style had become everything now that we had left the social realism of the angry young man behind. One sequence had the photographer-hero mobbed by teeny-boppers wrenching off their coloured tights for an orgy. Yet I was flattered when Antonioni told me he admired my reportage, which he had seen in European magazines. What exactly he wanted from me I was unsure, but I went around with him while he was looking for locations. He transformed one dreary park in south London by having everything in it painted, including the grass. I produced the blow-ups for his film Blow-Up, which became a cult movie.
The success of the Sunday Times was a Sixties phenomenon in itself. It had transformed itself from a deadly dull Tory rag into probably the most exciting newspaper in the world, and most of the transforming was done by people in their twenties and thirties under a brilliant and enlightened young editor from Yorkshire called Harry Evans. The Delinquent Generation of the war years had come into its own, with a drive, commitment, scepticism and rebellion peculiar to that age. I felt safe and happy with these people. Harry had great enthusiasm for photo-journalism, and that made a big difference to me. He was always interested and friendly without interfering, and under him photographers gained a
new status, helped no doubt by the photographic staff having in their midst a member of the Royal Family, Anthony Armstrong-Jones.
The editor of the magazine, for which I did most of my work, was Godfrey Smith, a thoughtful man who knew how to get the best out of people with the minimum of fuss. When I left for the war front in Biafra the day after our third child was born, Godfrey sent my wife a massive bunch of flowers. You pulled out a little bit more for someone who showed he cared in this way. Godfrey’s free-wheeling think-tank—which included Dave King and Peter Crookston, whom I had known at the Observer, Francis Wyndham and fashion editor Meriel McCooey, as well as art editor Michael Rand—turned the Sunday colour magazine from a frivolous optional extra into a force to be reckoned with.
I was allowed to edit all my own pictures at the Sunday Times, a privilege that was not extended to any other photographer in Fleet Street, nor I think in the world. In exchange I would go away two or three times a year and risk my life. But I was also allowed some relaxation away from the world’s wars with interesting projects like the Beatles or Fidel Castro’s Cuba. I photographed the Beatles on two occasions, and was instantly engaged by the personality of Paul McCartney. It was harder to warm to John Lennon, who tended to sneer about passers-by who recognised him. As well as enormous talent, he had an abrasive, aggressive quality that was ironic in an apostle of Peace and Love. It was no easier to hit it off with Yoko Ono, who fussed around while I was trying to take pictures on a studio set (designed by Snowdon) on the top floor of the Sunday Times building in Gray’s Inn Road. It was an all-day session the Beatles had asked me to do for them when they got tired of people asking them for pictures they did not possess. I had come in from taking some location shots and did not want to hear Yoko talking, not to me but to others, about where I was stationing myself to take the interiors.