McCullin (2012) Movie Script
Tonight's Imagine presents an intimate portrait
of the great British war photographer and photojournalist
Don McCullin.
In his early 20s, and with no formal training,
McCullin began his career here in Finsbury Park,
photographing the violent teenage gangs ruling the roost in the 1950s.
He would go on to capture history as it was being made,
bearing witness to the bloodiest conflicts of the last 50 years.
Despite announcing his retirement from the warzone ten years ago,
after returning from Iraq,
McCullin decided to make a trip to Syria late last year.
He wanted to show the human side of the ongoing conflict in Aleppo,
where, not for the first time in his career, he came under sniper fire.
A self-confessed war junkie,
Don McCullin's quest to bring the ugly truths of the war
to international attention would come at great personal cost.
Jacqui and David Morris's often graphic film
lays bare the addiction to danger, and the commitment to justice,
that lie at the heart of this extraordinary life.
This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.
War is partly madness, mostly insanity,
and the rest of it is schizophrenia.
You do ask yourself, "Why am I here? What's my purpose?
"What's this got to do with photography?"
And it goes on and on, the questioning.
You're trying to stay alive, you're trying to take pictures,
you're trying to justify your presence there.
And you think, "What good is this going to do anyway?
"These people have already been killed."
There were many battles within my own mind,
before I got to these major conflicts.
And when I got there, I was even more confused.
I try to stay calm.
I try not to indulge myself in this picture-taking.
It was something I was meant to do, but how far was I allowed to take it?
There was a lot of hypocrisy spinning around
inside my own mind at the time.
I didn't really think, um, it was right to be there,
because I sometimes felt that
the people who were doing these terrible things
thought, you know, that I was OK-ing it,
which I certainly wasn't.
The first execution I ever saw in my life
was a dawn execution of a bomber who had killed a load of people
in the Saigon market a few weeks before.
And there were all these photographers and journalists,
they were all on this Jeep, you couldn't get another man on,
and there was nowhere I could see. But I saw the event.
They brought the man, in a Volkswagen truck.
He got out and screamed anti-Americans.
The firing squad shot him.
A man stepped forward, grabbed a turf of his hair,
and shot him through the brains.
And I stood there with my mouth wide open.
And I heard a man saying,
"God, that was great stuff, did you get it, did you get it?"
And I have never forgotten, to this day, and that was in 1965,
and I didn't get it.
And I never said anything about this situation
to the people in the Sunday Times, because they would have thought
I must have been a rank amateur not to have got such a picture.
But, looking back,
did I have the right to take that man's picture of his murder?
Because, in a way, public executions are nothing less than murder.
And I didn't get the picture.
MUSIC AND APPLAUSE
You came from a fairly rough background, didn't you, in London?
It seems an unlikely ambition to have, your first ambition,
to be a painter. Was that regarded as a bit sissy?
Well, yes, it was, because where I live,
you were expected to take on anybody.
You'd never back down from an argument.
I used to get some terrible hidings when I was a boy.
But my father, when he was alive,
he used to let me draw on the kitchen wall.
And I'd actually stick pieces of paper on the wall,
but I went over the edge, so there was always
empty pictures with marvellous edges.
RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER
I lived in a house that was a tenement house,
so we could knock huge nails in the walls and stick things on the walls.
I wouldn't let my kids do it now but...
My art career didn't last very long,
because I got a junior art scholarship,
and my father died and I had to go to work.
MUSIC: "Move It" by Cliff Richard
# Come on, pretty baby, let's move it and a-groove it
# Well, shake, oh, baby, shake, oh, honey, please don't lose it
# It's rhythm that gets into your heart and soul
# Well, let me tell you, baby, it's called rock'n'roll. #
I took a set of pictures of the boys I grew up with.
They were involved in the killing of a policeman.
They didn't actually kill the policeman,
the rival gang that came from Islington,
they were responsible for that killing.
So, I took the photos to the Observer.
They asked me to do more. I did more.
They published the photos.
They gave me the princely sum of 50.
In those days, 50 from where I came from was like five weeks' wages.
And then, I was, I suppose you could say, I was on the road to photography
which has been a lifelong love affair.
It has been really an amazing experience for me.
Because you've got to remember, I don't have any education,
I couldn't read properly.
I came from a violent background where people were mostly interested
in how well you could fight or steal, or do harm to society.
So, quite honestly, having this amazing door opening, someone saying,
"There's your freedom from ignorance and bigotry and violence."
It was amazing I managed to escape from Finsbury Park.
I've often wondered, how did he get that first memorable,
urban landscape of the lads, the gang,
The Guv'nors, as they were called in East London,
standing in a derelict house?
Perfectly framed by the building,
and seeing right through the building.
It was so emblematic of gang warfare and the roughness of London.
And here we have a picture which is almost beautiful in its composition.
You could say, there is no beauty in what this gang was up to.
But he related, he had a sensitivity.
An empathy is something you can't fake.
This is the bloke I gave a good hiding to.
HE LAUGHS
He tried to hit me with a brick.
We had all been to a funeral.
One of the little girls had committed suicide,
put her head in a gas oven over some bloke I grew up with.
We came back from the funeral, and he ran past my car
and snapped the wing mirror off.
And he was peeing in this alleyway,
that's when I should really have laid into him, while he was peeing,
because it's difficult to fight back if you're in a situation like that.
Then he picked a brick up, came roaring at me.
Then I managed to get hold of it and reverse the charges.
Wasn't I lucky to have grown up in a period of the '60s, '70s, the '80s,
when it was all happening?
It was as if, like it was carved out for me, really.
I did grasp the nettle,
I didn't just look at it and think, "God, I wish I was there."
I used to say, "I'm going to go there." And I did.
- NEWSREEL:
- Paris in the spring of 1961,
and the time of President Kennedy's visit, was as beautiful as ever.
I was in Paris with my wife, my new wife really,
we'd only been married a few weeks.
And I was like a fish out of water really,
because I couldn't speak the language.
And whilst we were in Paris, I saw somebody reading a newspaper.
It was a photograph of an East German soldier
jumping over some barbed wire, which was only, at that stage,
separating them from the West.
Of course, the story had been building up,
potentially been building up.
I looked at this photograph, it was a memorable picture.
And I said to her, "When we get back to England,"
knowing I only had 70 in my savings account,
"would you mind if I went to Berlin?"
And she said, "Of course I don't mind."
- NEWSREEL:
- The East Germans don't seem to have girders enough
to plug every hole.
When a soldier's attention is diverted by others,
a hole is cut in the barbed wire,
and Khrushchev's face is slapped again.
I rang the Observer newspaper, and they said,
"We're not interested in you going."
And I said, "Well, I bought the ticket." There was no commission.
So, I got near to a place called Friedrichstrasse,
which was the centre of all the problem.
The Americans were facing the Russians.
There were tanks facing each other.
At that stage, in Friedrichstrasse,
they were actually building the beginnings of the Berlin Wall.
This was really the right place to be.
- NEWSREEL:
- Camera crews are harassed by reflecting mirrors
held by East German police.
Water hoses are played on equipment.
Nevertheless, our reporters are able to come up with remarkable pictures,
despite these hazards.
My camera equipment wasn't very good, actually.
I had a camera I had bought during my time in the air force.
It was totally the wrong shape
to give me the kind of pictures that I needed.
But, nevertheless, I stretched the use of this camera, kneeling down
and holding it up high and doing all kinds of funny things with it.
By the time that I'd been there a few days,
that wall went up pretty fast. And people could not escape.
And I looked at East German soldiers
leaning out of buildings on the other side of the wall, with binoculars.
And looking right at me. And I thought,
"They can't hurt me, because they're over there and I'm here."
It was very exciting, it was at the heightened part of the Cold War
where the Russians were quite prepared
to make a stand against the West, and vice versa.
What it really comes down to is that I was sitting on top of
the most important news story in the world.
And it was my decision,
this intuition that took me there in the first place.
So, I was beginning to show signs of having a brain
that was functioning in the right direction.
I came back to England with the film
and got it processed in the Observer's darkroom.
And they saw the pictures and they ran half a page of my story.
The story was then entered into the news category
for the News Pictures of the Year. And I won this award.
And the Observer gave me a contract after that.
So, I started getting better jobs at the Observer.
I started going to all kinds of political rallies and things.
I would go to the East End of London
and photograph disturbances with Oswald Mosley, situations like that.
It was a developing and an expanding situation
for the early part of my career.
- NEWSREEL:
- The tinderbox that is Cyprus threatens to erupt
into a full-scale war.
Greek students demonstrate against British and US proposals
that a force of NATO troops help maintain a truce on the island
until differences between Greeks and Turks can be resolved.
I walked into the Observer office one day, and the editor said to me,
"How would you consider covering the civil war for us in Cyprus?"
And at that point in my life, I wasn't ready.
And I felt that, when I think about those words, I think,
I must have been levitating. I felt as if I was rising off the ground.
I knew that the second door was opening.
- NEWSREEL:
- The terror of civil war struck Cyprus in December.
On Boxing Day, the British came in to stop the bloodshed.
So, I thought, I'm going to do my best here.
And I'm going to make an impression. This is my big chance.
So, I went to the Turkish community.
And they were surrounded by the Greeks.
I managed to slip past the roadblocks and get in.
I could hear gunfire.
That was the first time I had heard, in my life, hostile gunfire.
And then, suddenly, out of the cinema burst a man with a machine gun,
and he had a raincoat on and a flat hat.
And he looked like something like a Sicilian Mafioso bandit.
And then people ran out with mattresses on their heads,
women and children, as if a mattress would stop a bullet.
And this was my baptism of war.
I had to assess very quickly what was going on,
where the fire was coming from.
As the day wore on, we were trapped in these empty streets.
There were groups of fighters, Turkish defenders.
And funny, curious things caught my eye.
I could remember a group of men behind barricades.
It was almost like the Spanish Civil War, really.
And by the barricade, there were men with an ill-assorted bunch of weapons
and old, almost muskety-looking kind of museum pieces.
But standing near this group of men was a beautiful dog.
I thought, "Why is it that these things come to you,
"when you should be thinking about more serious things?"
But to be truthful, these little things sometimes tell you
much more about a story than the obvious things.
So, I think what I'm getting down to here is,
we're talking about sensitivity.
What I had to realise at the time, I was learning a new trade.
I was learning about the price of humanity and its sufferings.
- NEWSREEL:
- Now, four months later, the armed forces of both sides
are still defying the UN's attempts to keep the peace.
And the Cyprus situation is as dangerous and complex as ever.
The UN is powerless to do anything
that would really help restore law and order.
I saw a whole village trying to evacuate, they were being attacked,
to somewhere with more safety, like a school building.
And there was this one old lady, who was lame, and she had two sticks.
And she really couldn't get those legs moving.
And there was a British soldier trying to coax her along,
persuade her to hurry up before she'd probably lose her life.
And I was with a friend of mine, I said, "This is ridiculous."
I took one picture of the soldier and the old lady,
and I put my cameras down.
And I scooped this old lady up in my arms.
It was like scooping up some rag doll that had fallen from a child's pram.
I just ran and ran with her. I don't know why I did it.
But I didn't really want to see that old lady shot down and killed.
And I went back to my position as a photographer, and I carried on.
But it made me feel good.
I it made me feel as if I wasn't just there as a voyeur
that was enjoying other people's misery and possible deaths.
It's a very fine line.
I've been constantly accused of taking terrible pictures
and people saying, "Did you ever help anyone?"
Of course I did. But I don't want to brag about it.
I did it sometimes to clear my own conscience.
These little battles were erupting all over
the northern part of the island of Cyprus, where the Turks lived.
We saw this soldier looking at the bodies, and I said,
"What's happening?" He said, "There's been some killing," he said,
"There's a dead body up there and some more in that house."
I knocked on the door, I tapped on this door and there was no answer.
And I let myself in.
And the first thing I was greeted with was warm blood.
These men had been murdered the day before,
and the warm, early morning sunlight had penetrated through
the glass door of this house.
And I closed the door and I tiptoed around the room,
and I got myself in a corner, and I was taking the first shot.
And suddenly, the door opened and, to my horror, the whole family burst in.
I thought, my God, they're going to be really cross, finding me in here.
To my astonishment, they weren't, so I carried on photographing.
And there was a woman who started screaming like mad.
And the truth was that it was her husband who was just below my feet,
who was dead. A new husband at that, they had only been married a week.
And the Greeks came the day before and attacked this community
and murdered these people in cold blood in this house.
I'd go into a village one day, and I got there in the early morning.
And they were finding bodies of Turkish men
who were defending the villages.
And then they were coming back to the village
and telling women that their husbands had been killed.
And then you saw these Goya-esque kind of poses
of people looking up to Christ.
I've noticed that a lot in wars.
When people are in deep grief and emotion, they look up
as if they can see God himself there, offering them some help.
And you see that in Goya's drawings.
Before men are being shot or massacred,
they look up, or they are praying,
and it's part of that religious nature of the great painters.
That moment is so classic.
I call it one of the decisive moments in photography.
Because it combines the news moments with the compositional elements
which make a photograph in themselves.
So, there is something, a second or two would have made a difference.
I asked Don how he took the picture.
As I recall it, he actually had to fall to his knees quickly to get it
because he just sensed it was coming.
I mean, OK, I talk as if there's a lot of poetry in me.
There isn't. I'm a photographer. I am neither an artist or a poet.
I'm a photographer.
And one of the things I've learned most of all, erm,
over and above photography,
the very best qualifications you can have when you are in this situation,
and you are exercising this duty as a photographer, or whatever, reporter,
is that it's much better to be on the side of humanity.
All this was coming at me so fast, this responsibility.
And I felt, almost from the word go, I got a grip of it,
and I thought, I understand what I'm doing for the first time.
I'm meant to be doing this.
There was a decree put out that journalists were not allowed
to leave Leopoldville.
And then I thought, here I am, all this way out here in the Congo
and now I can't even leave out of the capital.
So, I had it in mind, and I knew that there were mercenaries
operating up in a place called Stanleyville.
I quickly managed to discover all this.
I've been appointed by Mr Tchombe
to recruit a number, which I can't disclose,
of men to form a fighting unit in the Congo,
to dispel the present rebellion.
"Mercenary" is a dirty word.
This unit is going to change the meaning of that word,
and "mercenary" will now be a badge of honour,
rather than a dirty word in the English language.
I met one of these mercenaries, and his name was Alan Murphy.
And I said, "Could you get me some information about this?"
And I pumped him for how to get there.
And he said, what happens was, every morning,
a C130 American plane, under the CIA,
would take groups of mercenaries to Stanleyville.
And I said, "Could you get me one of your shirts and a pair of trousers,
"and if I sleep overnight in the hotel,
"would you kick my bed in the morning when you get the call to leave?"
And he did just that.
And I see myself now, many, 40 years ago, standing on that runway
with the early-morning rain shower that had passed.
And a man with a clipboard, who happened to be a CIA man,
asking people's names. And I thought, I've had it. I've had it, you know.
Then he came up to me and he said, "What's your name?"
And I said, "McCullin." He said, "You're not on the list."
I said, "I should be," and my legs were like jelly.
And he said, he wrote my name down, he said, "OK, climb aboard."
And I'd cracked this amazing no-go situation.
When I arrived in Stanleyville,
I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming,
people crying and gunfire.
And I saw gangs of boys who had been tied up, and they were being beaten
and shot in the back of the head and kicked into the river.
I was looking at all this.
I had my little camera in my bag, and 20 rolls of film.
And I thought, how am I going to bring my camera out now
and declare that I shouldn't be here and I'm not a mercenary?
Because it was a huge gamble.
And it was the Congolese gendarmerie who were killing these people,
torturing them, dragging them behind trucks on wires,
it was really terrible.
They were skinned alive, some of them.
It was a kind of wood yard, and they were sitting in a corner, shivering.
Knowing that any moment, they would be shot.
And then they dragged some of these boys out in front of me
and started brutalising them.
And I had no power, by the way, to prevent this.
I took a few pictures and I walked away.
I thought, you know, you have a moral sense of purpose and duty.
You have to work out which of those purposes and duty you are there for.
It's very difficult too.
You want to take this picture, and you want to stop it.
And it's a very difficult thing.
It came up more and more my life,
seeing people executed in front of me.
GUNFIRE
RAPID GUNFIRE
There was a man called Mike Hoare
who was battling on the other side of this river, the Lualaba.
He was in charge of Fifth Commando,
these mercenaries I had teamed up with.
So, I arrived on the other side.
And then, Mike Hoare came to me and said,
"What are you doing, who are you? Where have you come from?"
And I said, "I have to be clean with you now,
"I'm working for the Observer newspaper."
He wouldn't have understood the German magazine, Quick.
I immediately fell back on my English heritage.
So, he said, "I'll deal with you in the morning,
"I'm going to hand you over to the Congolese military."
Which one knew right away, that would be curtains.
He said, "I admire what you have done, but I don't condone it."
And then he totally switched his whole kind of attitude
and offered to take me on this journey
chasing these Simbas who had abducted these nuns.
And they were cutting them to pieces with machetes on the way down,
as they were fleeing from us.
And we caught up with them.
There was goodness in Mike Hoare,
but there wasn't much goodness in what he stood for, really.
He was there for the adventure and the money.
There was one mercenary Rhodesian and I was sleeping in the same room
and he had a whole box of stuff and I said, "Where did you get that?"
He said, "I've just blown the bank in town but there was no money in it, unfortunately."
Halfway through the night, I heard gunfire
and I woke up in a great sweat.
This Rhodesian had got drunk and shot these two African boys,
who were doing all the laundry and the cooking
for these mercenaries for breakfast.
I remember looking at one of these poor black boys,
he was about 12 years old and his eyes were open.
And I looked at the mercenary and he said, "They asked for it.
"I found a weapon on them." Which wasn't true.
You know, some of these mercenaries,
they just had a lust for killing Africans.
HE MOANS
I hated them in the end.
GUNSHOT/HE SHOUTS
When I came away from these atrocities, I kept thinking,
"How am I going to get through this?"
I love what I'm doing, I love photography but, you know,
this other stuff is really too awful to live with, you know.
And sometimes people used to say to me, "Do you have nightmares?"
I would say, "No.
"Only in the daytime, when my eyes are open and I'm awake
"and my memory is, you know, on full alert."
So when I see... I love photography,
I love being in my darkroom, but even my darkroom is a haunted place.
I go in there with the red light and it's like being in a womb
and I play that music, which is only classical music,
it somehow pleases me, but at the same moment,
it takes me down and down and down to where I don't want to go.
It's like as if I'm drowning in a very deep ocean...
..and I'm trying to get back to the top again to see the daylight.
So, you know, I don't just take photographs. I think.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
I would come back to Finsbury Park,
because unfortunately,
I was still living in quite poor circumstances with my new wife.
And then, when there were odd days when I had nothing to do,
I would go to the Wimpy bar and hang out with the same tribe, you know.
And then they would say, "Where have you been lately?"
I'd say, "I've been to the Congo with the mercenaries."
And they would try to humour me...
..but basically, they were almost putting me down,
as if I was living in a Walter Mitty world.
I did about four and a half years on the Observer
and things were beginning to slow down for me and I could also...
I started getting the taste and the need
to do much bigger, you know, international stories.
And a friend of mine called David King,
who worked at the Sunday Times, said to me,
"Why don't you come and join us?
"Why don't you come and do some work for us? I'll give you work."
So I did and he sent me off to the Mississippi.
BLUES MUSIC
It was an amazing part of the world, the Mississippi.
They had the sharecroppers,
the black people who brought in the cotton,
living in shacks and sheds, and then you had New Orleans,
where we basically, we arrived in New Orleans and it was amazing to see.
And there was a Ku Klux Klan rally one night.
It was like Hollywood.
There was the big fire cross burning,
these rather hateful people in these ridiculous kind of outfits,
smoking huge cigars and basically
saying, "Welcome," but, you know, at the same time intimidating us.
I managed to, you know, get a few pictures, which David King,
when I came back, put together.
You know, you can take amazing pictures,
but you still need to have them presented
in a way that the public can accept them and understand them.
That was my first assignment for the Sunday Times.
Roy Thompson was not a journalist himself,
but he was the best friend journalism ever had.
He was very proud of his newspapers
and he was so proud of their independence,
he had a card printed which he carried in his pocket.
So when Roy Thompson was attacked,
"Why are you papers publishing this?"
or, "Why are you putting these war photographs in the colour magazine?
"We advertisers don't like it."
He would pause and take out of his pocket a little card
and it said, it was a kind of oath he'd made, you know,
"The newspapers that I control will always be independent
"and will run professionally and I do not interfere in them."
So he would put the card back in his pocket and would say,
"You wouldn't expect me to go against my own word, would you?"
I was very privileged because I worked on the colour magazine,
which was directly associated with the Sunday Times newspaper.
And I had equally wonderful people there
who allowed me to just disappear and come back several weeks later
and on top of all that, allow me to edit my own material.
He knew he had the confidence that if he did his part
and took his photographs and reported with integrity
and accuracy and with a sense of composition,
that it wasn't going to be interfered with
or rejected because of some other concerns.
He trusted me and so it meant that I would try that much harder
for people who gave me this wonderful freedom.
So Roy Thomson, backing his editors,
was crucial to the career of Don McCullin.
MUSIC: "Tin Soldier" by The Small Faces
The '60s were packed with opportunities
if you wanted to go to war.
# I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire... #
Israeli soldiers, fresh from street fighting,
snapped one another at the Wailing Wall.
Pictures for girlfriends, or people from Tel Aviv.
# All I need is treat me like a man
# Cos I ain't no child... #
If they think that I've come back happy,
they know that I've got something ghastly to show.
And if I've got something ghastly to show,
it means that I'm trying to get the message over to people
that even though I like being in a war and I like being there
because it's a great adventure for me,
my duty is to be there for a reason, not just to have a bloody good time.
I covered the battle of the citadel of Hue,
which was the biggest battle I'd ever been in.
I mean, I wouldn't like to go through a year without being in a war.
And it went on for two weeks
and that was really the beginning of real madness.
I'm getting a bit bad, really,
because I'm looking forward to doing two wars a year
and if I start looking forward to doing two or even more a year,
I'm not going to survive.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
GUNFIRE
Sleeping next to dead bodies.
Looking at men who had been run over by tanks
and looked like Persian carpets in the road.
People with their brains hanging out.
Living under tables and sleeping in rat-infested rooms.
It was like, basically, going into total madness and insanity.
I stood for two weeks in that battle,
watching dozens and dozens of American soldiers being killed
and wounded and being dragged towards me.
They looked as if they'd been taken from a butcher's shop, with blood everywhere.
In the end, I became totally mad, free,
running around like a tormented animal.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
I've got to make sure that when they look at my pictures,
if it's on a Sunday morning after breakfast,
that it's going to hit them hard.
The very first man I saw in that Battle of Hue
had been hit in the face with two bullets.
And he had a bandage around him.
It looked like a child who had his porridge dripping down his face,
through this bandage, but in fact it was blood and not porridge.
Big, gooey chunks of human gore, just coming out of his face.
I put my camera up to my face
and he tried to move his head, this soldier,
but his eyes were screaming at me not to photograph him,
so I took my camera and went somewhere else.
There was no shortage of, you know, human flesh to photograph that day.
Our most vivid memory of the battle
was that it was one of the most intense battles of the Vietnam War.
Don came in and joined us and he just kind of showed up,
but what was unique about Don is that the other correspondents
and photographers would show up and, what I would say, snap and go.
They would take their pictures and then be out of there.
Don, for whatever the reason, decided to join with us,
stay with us and for several days, he became one of us.
On one occasion, on more than one occasion,
went out at great risk to himself
to assist with bringing some of our wounded casualties back
to where we could evacuate them.
His classic photo of the shell-shocked Marine
is a Delta Company Marine.
I dropped on my knees and photographed this man.
I shot five frames, each one singularly.
One, two, three, four, five.
There is not one blink of an eyelid. There's not one change.
All those negatives are exactly the same.
I have kept up with a sizeable number
of the Marines from Delta Company.
We get together periodically and that individual has not surfaced,
so I don't know his history from that day on.
PIANO MUSIC
DISTANT GUNFIRE
I photographed this giant American
who looked like an athlete, but he was throwing a hand grenade.
Within seconds, this sniper hit this soldier in the hand
and he had a hand like a cauliflower.
It was all busted and bursting open.
The picture itself almost defeats the anti-war feeling
that I was trying to put across,
because he looks the picture of manhood,
like a javelin thrower at an Olympic event.
Instead of that,
he was throwing a hand grenade which was meant to bring death to others.
DISTANT GUNFIRE
The one meaningful picture I took in that battle
was a man who had been hit in both legs, an American Marine.
He was being supported by two friends
and if ever I thought, at the very moment in my atheistic kind of mind,
that I was looking at something purely religious, was of this man,
who looked like Jesus Christ being taken down from the cross.
When it was over, about 50% of the Marines were casualties.
In my own case, I went in with a company of 120 Marines
and sailors and at the end of the battle,
there were 39 of us that were still standing.
So you can see from just those shots how chaotic it was.
After two weeks, I got back to the press centre in Da Nang
and I realised I hadn't taken my clothes off, my underwear,
anything off for two weeks.
And, you know, I had a beard and I was haunted-looking.
I took those clothes off and threw them straight into the waste bin,
my underwear and everything I stood in, and had a shower.
I think I could have easily broke down in that shower and cried,
you know, I was so...
..so drained and used and crushed by two weeks of seeing people dying.
And you know, I think what I'm trying to say here is trying to be honest.
You know, photography suddenly didn't come into the picture, even.
It had nothing to do with photography.
After a while, if you are that involved in that kind of situation,
it's not about photography, it's about humanity.
Still photographs do have this strong affinity
with the way we remember, so...
And the vibrations of a still photograph can be intense
and can last for ever.
I can remember that Don sometimes worries,
I know, about, "Have I taken these risks? Is it worthwhile?"
I can tell him it is
because nobody can trace...it's like throwing a stone in a pond.
The ripples go out and you can't say,
"This ripple was caused by this stone," but they are.
And I think the disenchantment with the Vietnam War in America
is powerfully reinforced by some of the photographers,
American photographers, including Don McCullin.
Photography is the truth if it is being handled by a truthful person
and I have to tell you that I have a lot of integrity.
I would never tell a lie.
I would never try to recreate something that wasn't real.
I did a picture once where I did recreate something.
It was the only time I ever did it,
but I saw some Americans looting the body of a dead soldier,
looking for souvenirs and mocking the body, mocking the person.
And when they went away,
having rifled all through his personal things,
I brought them together and made a kind of montage
of this pathetic possessions of this North Vietnamese soldier.
It's the only time I've ever done it,
but I thought I would make a statement for this soldier.
I have no shame about doing that.
I have this picture and I think it says what I was trying to make it say, that, you know,
"Hear me. I am just a victim of war."
I was trying to say this about this young man.
We had total freedom in Vietnam.
That, of course, made the Americans feel,
when the war finally came to an end,
that it was the media that let them down.
They felt a bit upset about that, because they had given us
every facility and all they got in exchange was, you know,
that public opinion turned against the war in Vietnam.
So if you go to Afghanistan now, you are totally controlled.
They are never going to be allowed to take the kind of photographs
I did in Vietnam of the real thing, the battle, the price of war
and the suffering and loss, so the whole rulebook has been rewritten.
And it doesn't come out in our favour.
You just said it's a rotten job
and yet you have, in fact, sought it out.
You've sought out war and famine and misery
in all the time I've known you, which has been a long, long time.
Yes, I did it because I thought it was just going to be soldiers,
and then when I got to war,
I thought it was amazingly exciting to lay under
a barrage of shells dropping on me, or a sniper trying to get me.
I thought, you know, that was a challenge,
and I have swum around with many dead bodies in canals
to get by them when the sniper is working a ridge for me.
I felt I wanted to put my fingers up and say, "You missed it, mate."
And, you know, I had a very cocky attitude about warfare,
but then I started coming in contact with the real victims
and they are always the poor people who are not informed.
They don't have the Mercedes-Benz to get away.
They don't have the communication or the money to move off quick.
They are always the very poorest people who get clobbered.
And the amazing thing is that is where I started in my life,
living with poor people,
and when I am with them in those circumstances,
I have a very close affinity and understanding of what their lot is.
# I presume you never noticed
# How much I really cared... #
You are friends, aren't you?
- You are buddies, aren't you?
- Well, we're all buddies.
Can you look where my elbow is?
I want to see your face, if you don't mind. That's fine.
You're OK, aren't you? You don't mind? You don't mind me?
I'm not bullying you around, am I? OK, thanks.
I don't want to take liberties, you know.
I could have spent the rest of my life working
in Aldgate and Whitechapel, it's all there.
Photographically, it's all there.
It is a totally, what do they call it...
..Hogarthian kind of experience, when you are doing these pictures.
PIANO MUSIC
This is one of my favourite pictures and I've never,
ever printed it before.
Look at these men's hands.
They are all standing up asleep, these men.
These people used to try and put the dead eye on you.
By that, they would try to stare you out.
You must never flinch away like that. You must stare them out.
This is a woman called Jean.
She used to hang out under the arches of Liverpool Street Station.
She used to curtsey when I went up.
She used to say, "Hello, Captain Mark."
I said, "Why do you keep calling me Captain Mark?"
And she said, "Because you look like Captain Mark Phillips."
She said, "Would you like some tea?"
And I said, "You haven't got any milk."
She said, "I can always get it outside of people's front doors."
I loved her.
In fact, what I did, I found her somewhere to live.
This is a picture I really like.
It's like a fallen woman from the turn of the century.
I did this in Chapel Market on Sunday morning when I was very young.
She's been a posh woman, this woman.
You can tell by the handbag, tell by the clothes.
They're all young, now. They are not old people like this.
I think one of the best portraits I ever did
was this man in Spitalfields Market.
He was actually lying by the embers of an all-night fire
that these homeless men used to congregate around.
He sat up and looked at me full-face.
I just held his stare and I just brought my Nikon camera up
to my eye and took this picture and he never moved an eyelid.
I was looking at the bluest eyes you've ever seen
and his hair was matted.
I felt as if I was looking at one of those Neptune images
of a man under the sea, you know, with a trident.
It was quite extraordinary.
So pleased with the picture.
MUSIC: "Blue Peter Theme"
This year it's a matter of life and death.
GUNSHO There has been a war going on in West Africa for two years now.
It's a civil war between the Biafrans and the Nigerians.
We're not going to say which side is right or which side is wrong,
except that all war is always wrong.
I went two or three times.
Aeroplanes that used to take in aid
used to land on an extended road, which was their airstrip.
It was called Uli Airstrip and you went at night
and the Federal Government had hired,
you know, Russian pilots and foreign pilots
to try and shoot these planes down.
This one is flying the other side of the mission church,
sweeping to the right.
Streaking the ground as they move,
dropping incendiary bombs and fragmentation bombs
in the places around here.
So, going in to Uli Airstrip at night was a very hairy experience.
There are crews out there willing to fly, despite the lack of permission
and we will just try and fly in.
- But you stand a good chance of being shot down?
- I don't think so, no.
They seem to have been fairly trigger-happy in the past, though.
Anyway, we are going to try and let us see.
Ms Ryder, why are you going as well?
Well, because one feels very concerned, clearly,
with anyone who is suffering any distress anywhere
and partly because one has seen a situation in Europe,
in the past, perhaps similar to this.
PIANO MUSIC
I walked into a camp which was actually an old school building
and there were 800 dying children, standing there, waiting for me.
You know, when you go into a camp with 800 dying children,
some of whom are actually dropping down and dying in front of me,
they think you're coming with some form of salvation.
They don't realise you're coming to take pictures and get information.
That's not what they want. You know, they want food.
I saw this particular boy that haunts me to this day.
He was an albino boy and he was standing, looking at me.
Barely managing to stand on his spindly legs.
When you're an albino in Africa,
you're singled out all the time for bullying and God knows what.
He was clutching a French corned beef tin,
some previous aid gift which he'd licked the interior completely dry.
And I thought, "I can't look at this boy." It was too much.
He was staring at me, so I went somewhere else
and spoke to a doctor, cos another child had collapsed
and was dying and suddenly, somebody touched my hand
and I looked down and it was the albino boy, he was holding my hand.
And I thought, "Why are you doing this to me?"
It was like he'd honed in on me and he was really paining me,
making me feel so ashamed.
So I gave him a barley sugar from my pocket and he went away
and he stood at a distance, licking this barley sugar.
There were children of two years old,
crawling around on their stomachs with their anus hanging out.
I've never seen anything so terrible in all my life,
the inside of their whole backside
had kind of invertedly kind of suddenly fell out
and they were dragging themselves around
with this inside-out situation of their bottoms,
with flies hanging on as they crawled.
I thought, this was worse than any inferno of insanity
that you could ever experience or see in your life.
It wasn't real, it was so horrible, so shocking.
And, you know, I almost become, well, I almost became paralysed.
I was so shocked.
I thought, "Take your mind off it. Take some pictures."
They said, "There's a girl you must see."
They said, "Her name is Patience."
They brought her in and she was completely naked.
She was 16 years of age,
days, if not one or two days, away from death.
And I thought, "How am I going to do this?"
And they sat her down and I asked the nurse
if she would place her hands over the lower part of her body,
cos I thought, you know,
"If I'm going to do this picture
"to show this terrible, shocking creature,
"I'm going to do it with as much dignity as I can rustle up
"and at least not take advantage of her nakedness."
You've never seen a more dignified person, you know,
you know, inches away from death.
PIANO MUSIC
And I remember one day seeing a woman trying to feed a child at the breast.
There was nothing for the child at the breast.
And I saw some writing at the back, in the far distance.
And after I'd photographed the woman, who, believe it or not,
was only 24 years of age and she looked like 65,
I went and read the writing in the far distance on the wall
and it had on the wall, "Today I am reborn."
And that little inscription took my legs away from me.
You know, you can go through so much as a photographer,
you put yourself there.
You don't ask, you know, you don't ask why you are there.
You go there and the same time you put yourself there.
You could refuse if you want.
I went there, but when I went there, I photographed these people
to show they had more dignity than most of us will ever dream of,
that being in the last throes of their life.
His awareness of the futility of it,
as well as the direct sight of these people dying on their feet...
..moved him enormously.
He always had empathy, of course,
with the soldier who was shot, but here he was looking at civilians.
Men and women without any clue about what was going on,
dying because of the ambitions
of some of the power-hungry people in the country.
MUSIC: "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd
# If I leave here tomorrow
# Would you still remember me?
# I must be travelling on now... #
I spent my whole life travelling the world. I was really on the move.
You know, I was constantly at London Airport
and waving goodbye to my little family.
# And this bird shall never change... #
I was very eager, as always,
and ambitious to get to the front of the fighting.
And the next thing I know,
we walked into an ambush and all hell broke loose.
GUNFIRE
There was tremendous, heavy AK-47 fire.
And I immediately ran down into the side of the road,
which is like a culvert.
And I thought, "I'm going to get my tail out of here."
Because, you know, what does one picture mean of a soldier under fire
if it's going to cost you your life?
For the first time, my nerve went.
I knelt behind a tube and there was an almighty explosion.
I was blown across the road.
I felt this terrible burning sensation in my legs
and everywhere from the waist downwards.
And all my past seemed to come before me and I thought, "This is it. I'm going to die."
So I crawled away for about 200 yards,
only to be put on the back of a truck,
having been stabbed with a morphine injection.
And then they filled the lorry up
with about half a dozen soldiers who were wounded.
I thought, "I'm going to take my mind off my own pain
"and I'm going to photograph what's going on in this truck."
They put the man on the truck right next to me
who took the full brunt of the mortar bomb that hit me,
but he got, unfortunately, all of it in his chest and stomach.
And he kept sitting up and trying to fight people holding him down.
He was fighting.
And he died on the way back in the truck to the hospital,
because I sat up and photographed him.
And I said, "I don't want you to take any more risks."
They took the risks as they judged fit
because they were independently-minded.
And I secretly rejoiced that they brought back what they did,
but nonetheless, the next time and the next time
and the next time, you thought,
"Pray to God that they are not playing Russian roulette with their own lives."
LOUD EXPLOSION
It was strange for me to get on an aeroplane and fly to Belfast,
drive to Londonderry, check into the hotel.
And you could guarantee that once the pubs turned out
at about 3-something in the afternoon,
that there you braced yourself
and you knew exactly where it would be.
It was almost like a football match. You knew where the action would be.
SHOUTING AND SCREAMING
It was bricks and bottles and stones
coming at the soldiers, who then fired rubber bullets
and CS gas back, and I used to be gassed on a regular basis.
But from a photographer's point of view, you couldn't miss.
It was like a theatre, really. It was like a play.
You knew the plot, you'd seen it many times before.
This particular day, I knew they were going to charge
and I was standing there with my short telephoto lens
and I took this picture of the "let's go and get them".
I wasn't totally aware that in the shop doorway by this taxi company
was a woman standing there, holding her mouth with total shock.
That made my picture much more poignant, really.
I came upon this highway
and saw these dying soldiers in the road, and I was with a very
nice friend of mine called Michael Nicholson, who was an ITV reporter.
Their wounds were kind of melting into the tar itself on the road.
So hot.
We prised them off the road and we draped them
across the bonnet of his Jeep.
And I stood on the front of it and kind of leaned on them
and we drove them back to a first aid medical centre for the army.
And we went back the next morning to see how they were, but they had died.
And I did lots of pictures of men coming in on that road
with pieces of cardboard around their feet,
because they threw their boots away
and, of course, they didn't last long on that road.
The whole thing was the most appalling shambles.
It was like the retreat from Moscow. Terrible disarray.
And so, when the Sunday Times published these pictures,
the South Vietnamese Government put me on a blacklist,
which I never thought for one minute existed.
I was building this reputation as a war photographer,
which today I really detest.
I worked for it and then,
when I suddenly felt that I was being acclaimed as a war photographer,
suddenly I felt uncomfortable and dirty.
I felt being called a war photographer
was like being called a mercenary.
Looking back on all that, I thought my family suffered very badly.
I was always waving goodbye to them and one wonders in their mind,
were they ever thinking, "Will we ever see this strange man again,
"who is supposed to be our father?"
But, you know, I didn't want to weaken my strength
by thinking in a sentimental way.
I wanted to do my job and then hopefully go home to them,
but it was very selfish, now I look back on it.
And it eventually ruined by marriage.
GUNFIRE
In Beirut's Christian stronghold,
Phalangist militiamen poured fire on neighbouring areas
held by Muslim leftists
and allies from the more extreme Palestinian guerrilla group.
Every day you had a twist in the Lebanon.
There is always something ghastly and new to kind of look at.
I did this photograph of all these Christians,
all proudly showing their manly side to them.
And the audacity was that they were wearing Christian crosses
and, you know, you think...
you expect more from Christianity
if you're displaying it in such a way than some of the terrible things
that they did in the name of Christianity.
On the political front, the situation still appears to be stalemate.
Efforts to implement a ceasefire clearly having failed
and parliament's attempts to hold a session...
The Palestinian areas, the kind of east side of Beirut,
right inside the Christian heartland.
And it was just, it was murder from the word go.
MUSIC
They started, you know, collecting prisoners.
It all happened so quickly.
I went to a house where I could hear a lot of women and children screaming.
A Christian was bringing the women and children down
the side of this stairwell and I could see two Palestinian young men
with their hands up, in the left-hand side of the stairwell.
The moment the women went out of the house,
the man next to me, and I was very close, you know,
very close, started opening up and killing these people in cold blood, immediately.
And they went down in a hail of bullets and blood, all up the wall.
And I went round the back of the stairwell, another stairwell,
and try to get a grip of myself, cos I was so shocked.
I couldn't believe what I had just seen.
I came out of the building
and there was another Christian gunman who had the women and children
and he said, "By the way, if I see you taking any pictures,
"I am going to kill you myself. Get out of here."
Everywhere I went that day,
I could see another person being murdered in front of me.
Of course, what I did eventually was get the picture of the man
playing the lute over the dead Palestinian girl's body.
They were so angry about it when it was published that they said
if they ever caught the man who took the picture, they would kill him.
In a way, it was almost an honour
that they wanted to kill me for taking the picture.
The 26-storey Holiday Inn is burning.
The third of a trio of five-star hotels
to be caught in the firing line.
This is the courtyard of the Hilton Hotel
and it was here that the fighting took place all last night.
When the Islamics overwhelmed part of the Christian area where I was,
they were actually ensconced in the Hilton Hotel and when they got in,
the Christians that they'd captured in there,
they took them to the top floor and they mutilated them
in a manly sense, by cutting off part of them, and they threw them,
alive, off the top of the building.
When it gets down to that kind of hatred,
it becomes a form of insanity.
It goes beyond your understanding of anything. Anything.
I don't know how he did it. He had a very sensitive conscience.
I would often call him "the conscience with a camera".
He had a very sensitive feel for other people's suffering,
which also gave him the impetus to feel,
"I can make people wake up to what is really going on here".
So the sensitivity which might have made him
recoil from the images was allied to this conscience of his which says,
"I've got to get this story. It can only be told by photographs."
His journalism, which is best when that cold eye of his,
if you like, was informed by the warmth of his empathy,
and by the text, which amplified the image which you could see.
It's an awful question to ask you, but do you think the images you take
of horror, of war, actually make anybody change their mind about it?
Actually, to be honest, I don't think they have.
I've been photographing war for about 16 years
and I've got very disillusioned.
And I've just had an exhibition
and the exhibition was mostly attended by very young people
and judging by the letters that I have received, which were many,
the people who wrote to me were very young people
and they are the people who care about war.
I think the rest of us, the middle-aged,
I hate to say this, people, they've had war and they've had enough of it.
I think they are sick about hearing about it now.
They think there is no solution, but the young people,
who are tomorrow's people,
they are more interested about trying to do something about it.
They feel ashamed of it and can't understand it.
I mean, why don't you settle for the easy life and earn 500 quid
a day taking pictures of ladies wearing bras and things?
- Or not wearing bras?
- I would probably get a heart attack.
LAUGHTER
Did you like this one? The sulky lover?
You would be if you had a face like that against you.
THEY LAUGH
This is one of my favourite pictures. I don't have many favourites.
It's a classic example of intrusion, of course,
but it's just showing the English.
The deckchairs says it all, doesn't it?
One thing about England, you can guarantee to find
all kinds of kind of crazy people in the summer.
There's not, I don't think there is a country quite like this country
for the diversities of people's manifestations.
You know, eccentrics.
You can get them by the bus-load here in England. I love it.
MUSIC: "This Is England" by The Clash
# I hear a gang fire on a human factory farm
# Are they howling out or doing somebody harm?
# On a catwalk jungle somebody grabbed my arm
# A voice spoke so cold, it matched the weapon in her palm
# This is England
# This knife of Sheffield steel
# This is England
# This is how we feel
# This is England... #
When the print unions sabotaged the Sunday Times,
they basically killed the paper.
The Thomson Organisation said, "We can't go on like this.
"We can't have the paper wrecked not only physically but economically."
So they put the paper up for sale.
And they had a perception, a judgement,
that Rupert Murdoch, with his history of being pretty tough,
would be better able to control the print unions.
And in some respects, that was a fair judgement.
You've had enough photographs. I think we really...
- And with Mr Evans.
- Mr Evans.
And though he made promises about the papers would maintain
their independence, he did not keep them.
And this, of course, was very, very bad news for British journalism
but it was also bad news, individually, for Don McCullin.
When Murdoch took over the Sunday Times
and Harold Evans went over to the Times newspaper,
we all felt that, you know, we were looking at the beginning of the end.
And I had had 18 fantastic years there.
The precious independence that he'd had and the ability to go
and tell an unvarnished truth through the medium of film
was now at risk, and so it proved to be.
MUSIC
The Falklands War suddenly appeared on the horizon and I thought,
"I want to be in on this, because for the first time in my life,
"I'm going to be in a big, international war with British soldiers."
You know, I thought I was the natural person
and to my astonishment, I was barred.
It didn't happen.
I was left behind and I was utterly miserable and devastated.
It was an appalling decision to keep Don McCullin off the boat,
creating the excuse that boat was full.
It seemed to be saying, "Your photography is so honest,
"so searing, so implicit with meaning, we can't take the risk
"of you accessing freedom of expression."
I thought it was the most appalling decision
and its effect on him was to seem to say,
"You've spent your life documenting things
"we don't think you should ever have documented,"
which, of course, was saying, "Why have you bothered?
"Why have you bothered to risk your life to try and tell the truth?"
That's the reason I went back to Lebanon,
because I didn't go to the Falklands.
The Lebanon War was erupting at the same time.
Cos, you know, I can always go somewhere else.
If I couldn't go to this war, I could go to another war, you know.
Cos I was suffering from what you become, a war junkie, really.
I was suffering from that problem, you know.
The massacres were carried out by an elite special security formation
of the Lebanese Christian Phalange.
The operation was, at all stages,
under direct control of senior Phalange commanders.
During that early stage of the massacre at Shatila Camp,
the Israeli forces fired a constant barrage of flares
to light up the camp for the Phalange forces.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
One morning in the hotel, very early,
I had a call from someone saying, "Are you Mr McCullin?" I said yes.
They said, "Will you come down to the lobby?
"We want to take you to the hospital at Sabra and Shatila."
They said, "About 21 people have been killed in this hospital,
"but we are not interested in that.
"We want to show you the worst aspect of what has happened here today."
They took me upstairs to the children's department
of the insane side of the hospital
and to my astonishment, there was one nurse who had stayed
for five days during this shelling and the others had fled the hospital.
And she showed me around and I couldn't believe
what I was looking at.
She said, "We've had to tie the children to the beds,"
she said, "because we couldn't cope.
"They would have got away and been injured."
And there were children tied to the beds,
covered in flies, in a heat you wouldn't understand.
So these children were lying in buckets of their own filth,
starving hungry, dying of thirst.
MUSIC
And she said, "There is a room with more children.
"I've had to lock them in the room and they are blind and insane,"
and she said, "They're only two years old, some of them."
And she opened the door of this room
and the heat that came out of it, you could've roasted a chicken in it.
And out swam, in their own filth and mess,
they were like blind rats, these children.
I don't think I was ever more ashamed of humanity.
I thought, "If this is what people can do in the name of, you know,
"Christianity or whatever, you know..."
Because the war was being conducted against the Christians,
or the Christians were fighting back and the Jews were shelling,
I mean, the whole thing was about religious madness.
Who was paying the price?
I wandered away. I was in deep shock and I thought, "I'm confused, here.
"Why am I here? What has this got to do with my original concept of being a photographer?"
And I wandered into another room just to get away
from all this horrible, horrible stuff.
And I saw a child sitting,
playing with bits of debris as if he had Lego.
I think it was a day of reckoning for me,
because I don't think I could have ever touched on more tragedy,
all under one roof, than what I saw at that hospital that day.
I've never forgotten it.
The sad thing about these days that I never forget
is that they come back, on a regular basis,
as fresh as it was happening today, to haunt me.
There is nothing so powerful as reporting.
The government can't find out the things that reporters can.
Certainly, many governments wish to suppress
what can be found out, foreign governments and sometimes our own.
So this is a very,
very important quality of Don's impulses,
which is the passion to report what is happening
and insofar as that has diminished today,
we've lost a huge amount
and I think there is still a tremendous appetite
for really good photojournalism, really good reporting.
Mr Rupert Murdoch, on budget day,
asked me to resign as Editor of the Times. I refused.
At no time have the independent
national directors sought my resignation.
But in the circumstances, the differences between me
and Mr Murdoch should not be prolonged.
I am therefore resigning tonight as the Editor of the Times.
The reason I got pushed out of the Sunday Times was simple, actually.
They had brought a new editor in.
A man called Andrew Neil, who was very ambitious,
and quite, you know, he knew what he wanted.
Most new editors like to kick off with a new bunch of people
under them, but he did say that there would be no more
wars in the magazine and in fact, it would be a magazine
based on life and leisure, you know, to attract the ads.
So I was one of the first casualties,
because when I went and photographed wars and Africa
and dying and starving children,
I was going to make sure that I got the strongest images.
They didn't always sit well in a magazine
that was trying to sell you, you know, cars and luxury.
So I was definitely on the way out by that stage.
I asked him about the occasion he was invited to
an execution in Saigon and as I recall,
he went to the prison where the execution was going to take place
and turned back and refused to take the photograph.
It was because of his really powerful humanitarian impulses,
he didn't want to legitimise murder in any way.
Since, actually, his entire canon of photography
is to delegitimise violence and say,
"Look, these are the consequences of your political decision.
"These are the consequences of your greed.
"These are the consequences of your carelessness.
"Look on these and think again."
I think his entire impulse, a humanitarian photographer
with tremendous technical skill, amounting to genius, in my view.
MUSIC
I'm nearly 75 years of age now.
I still have some energy left, not a lot,
but I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate,
you know, the things we've been talking about.
I'm just going to photograph the landscape,
and the English landscape, to me, is my heaven.
My form of heaven.
The one thing that upsets me about it is, like all other things,
there is always a threat surrounding the things you love.
When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, you know,
I think a tree is dying.
When I hear shooting, when there is pheasant shooting,
I think there's going to be some blood somewhere.
The sound of gunfire immediately switches on
another part of my nervous system.
So I feel, as much as you try to run away from these things,
someone always presses a button and says, you know,
"Here is a reminder of, you know, what you used to do."
of the great British war photographer and photojournalist
Don McCullin.
In his early 20s, and with no formal training,
McCullin began his career here in Finsbury Park,
photographing the violent teenage gangs ruling the roost in the 1950s.
He would go on to capture history as it was being made,
bearing witness to the bloodiest conflicts of the last 50 years.
Despite announcing his retirement from the warzone ten years ago,
after returning from Iraq,
McCullin decided to make a trip to Syria late last year.
He wanted to show the human side of the ongoing conflict in Aleppo,
where, not for the first time in his career, he came under sniper fire.
A self-confessed war junkie,
Don McCullin's quest to bring the ugly truths of the war
to international attention would come at great personal cost.
Jacqui and David Morris's often graphic film
lays bare the addiction to danger, and the commitment to justice,
that lie at the heart of this extraordinary life.
This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing.
War is partly madness, mostly insanity,
and the rest of it is schizophrenia.
You do ask yourself, "Why am I here? What's my purpose?
"What's this got to do with photography?"
And it goes on and on, the questioning.
You're trying to stay alive, you're trying to take pictures,
you're trying to justify your presence there.
And you think, "What good is this going to do anyway?
"These people have already been killed."
There were many battles within my own mind,
before I got to these major conflicts.
And when I got there, I was even more confused.
I try to stay calm.
I try not to indulge myself in this picture-taking.
It was something I was meant to do, but how far was I allowed to take it?
There was a lot of hypocrisy spinning around
inside my own mind at the time.
I didn't really think, um, it was right to be there,
because I sometimes felt that
the people who were doing these terrible things
thought, you know, that I was OK-ing it,
which I certainly wasn't.
The first execution I ever saw in my life
was a dawn execution of a bomber who had killed a load of people
in the Saigon market a few weeks before.
And there were all these photographers and journalists,
they were all on this Jeep, you couldn't get another man on,
and there was nowhere I could see. But I saw the event.
They brought the man, in a Volkswagen truck.
He got out and screamed anti-Americans.
The firing squad shot him.
A man stepped forward, grabbed a turf of his hair,
and shot him through the brains.
And I stood there with my mouth wide open.
And I heard a man saying,
"God, that was great stuff, did you get it, did you get it?"
And I have never forgotten, to this day, and that was in 1965,
and I didn't get it.
And I never said anything about this situation
to the people in the Sunday Times, because they would have thought
I must have been a rank amateur not to have got such a picture.
But, looking back,
did I have the right to take that man's picture of his murder?
Because, in a way, public executions are nothing less than murder.
And I didn't get the picture.
MUSIC AND APPLAUSE
You came from a fairly rough background, didn't you, in London?
It seems an unlikely ambition to have, your first ambition,
to be a painter. Was that regarded as a bit sissy?
Well, yes, it was, because where I live,
you were expected to take on anybody.
You'd never back down from an argument.
I used to get some terrible hidings when I was a boy.
But my father, when he was alive,
he used to let me draw on the kitchen wall.
And I'd actually stick pieces of paper on the wall,
but I went over the edge, so there was always
empty pictures with marvellous edges.
RIPPLE OF LAUGHTER
I lived in a house that was a tenement house,
so we could knock huge nails in the walls and stick things on the walls.
I wouldn't let my kids do it now but...
My art career didn't last very long,
because I got a junior art scholarship,
and my father died and I had to go to work.
MUSIC: "Move It" by Cliff Richard
# Come on, pretty baby, let's move it and a-groove it
# Well, shake, oh, baby, shake, oh, honey, please don't lose it
# It's rhythm that gets into your heart and soul
# Well, let me tell you, baby, it's called rock'n'roll. #
I took a set of pictures of the boys I grew up with.
They were involved in the killing of a policeman.
They didn't actually kill the policeman,
the rival gang that came from Islington,
they were responsible for that killing.
So, I took the photos to the Observer.
They asked me to do more. I did more.
They published the photos.
They gave me the princely sum of 50.
In those days, 50 from where I came from was like five weeks' wages.
And then, I was, I suppose you could say, I was on the road to photography
which has been a lifelong love affair.
It has been really an amazing experience for me.
Because you've got to remember, I don't have any education,
I couldn't read properly.
I came from a violent background where people were mostly interested
in how well you could fight or steal, or do harm to society.
So, quite honestly, having this amazing door opening, someone saying,
"There's your freedom from ignorance and bigotry and violence."
It was amazing I managed to escape from Finsbury Park.
I've often wondered, how did he get that first memorable,
urban landscape of the lads, the gang,
The Guv'nors, as they were called in East London,
standing in a derelict house?
Perfectly framed by the building,
and seeing right through the building.
It was so emblematic of gang warfare and the roughness of London.
And here we have a picture which is almost beautiful in its composition.
You could say, there is no beauty in what this gang was up to.
But he related, he had a sensitivity.
An empathy is something you can't fake.
This is the bloke I gave a good hiding to.
HE LAUGHS
He tried to hit me with a brick.
We had all been to a funeral.
One of the little girls had committed suicide,
put her head in a gas oven over some bloke I grew up with.
We came back from the funeral, and he ran past my car
and snapped the wing mirror off.
And he was peeing in this alleyway,
that's when I should really have laid into him, while he was peeing,
because it's difficult to fight back if you're in a situation like that.
Then he picked a brick up, came roaring at me.
Then I managed to get hold of it and reverse the charges.
Wasn't I lucky to have grown up in a period of the '60s, '70s, the '80s,
when it was all happening?
It was as if, like it was carved out for me, really.
I did grasp the nettle,
I didn't just look at it and think, "God, I wish I was there."
I used to say, "I'm going to go there." And I did.
- NEWSREEL:
- Paris in the spring of 1961,
and the time of President Kennedy's visit, was as beautiful as ever.
I was in Paris with my wife, my new wife really,
we'd only been married a few weeks.
And I was like a fish out of water really,
because I couldn't speak the language.
And whilst we were in Paris, I saw somebody reading a newspaper.
It was a photograph of an East German soldier
jumping over some barbed wire, which was only, at that stage,
separating them from the West.
Of course, the story had been building up,
potentially been building up.
I looked at this photograph, it was a memorable picture.
And I said to her, "When we get back to England,"
knowing I only had 70 in my savings account,
"would you mind if I went to Berlin?"
And she said, "Of course I don't mind."
- NEWSREEL:
- The East Germans don't seem to have girders enough
to plug every hole.
When a soldier's attention is diverted by others,
a hole is cut in the barbed wire,
and Khrushchev's face is slapped again.
I rang the Observer newspaper, and they said,
"We're not interested in you going."
And I said, "Well, I bought the ticket." There was no commission.
So, I got near to a place called Friedrichstrasse,
which was the centre of all the problem.
The Americans were facing the Russians.
There were tanks facing each other.
At that stage, in Friedrichstrasse,
they were actually building the beginnings of the Berlin Wall.
This was really the right place to be.
- NEWSREEL:
- Camera crews are harassed by reflecting mirrors
held by East German police.
Water hoses are played on equipment.
Nevertheless, our reporters are able to come up with remarkable pictures,
despite these hazards.
My camera equipment wasn't very good, actually.
I had a camera I had bought during my time in the air force.
It was totally the wrong shape
to give me the kind of pictures that I needed.
But, nevertheless, I stretched the use of this camera, kneeling down
and holding it up high and doing all kinds of funny things with it.
By the time that I'd been there a few days,
that wall went up pretty fast. And people could not escape.
And I looked at East German soldiers
leaning out of buildings on the other side of the wall, with binoculars.
And looking right at me. And I thought,
"They can't hurt me, because they're over there and I'm here."
It was very exciting, it was at the heightened part of the Cold War
where the Russians were quite prepared
to make a stand against the West, and vice versa.
What it really comes down to is that I was sitting on top of
the most important news story in the world.
And it was my decision,
this intuition that took me there in the first place.
So, I was beginning to show signs of having a brain
that was functioning in the right direction.
I came back to England with the film
and got it processed in the Observer's darkroom.
And they saw the pictures and they ran half a page of my story.
The story was then entered into the news category
for the News Pictures of the Year. And I won this award.
And the Observer gave me a contract after that.
So, I started getting better jobs at the Observer.
I started going to all kinds of political rallies and things.
I would go to the East End of London
and photograph disturbances with Oswald Mosley, situations like that.
It was a developing and an expanding situation
for the early part of my career.
- NEWSREEL:
- The tinderbox that is Cyprus threatens to erupt
into a full-scale war.
Greek students demonstrate against British and US proposals
that a force of NATO troops help maintain a truce on the island
until differences between Greeks and Turks can be resolved.
I walked into the Observer office one day, and the editor said to me,
"How would you consider covering the civil war for us in Cyprus?"
And at that point in my life, I wasn't ready.
And I felt that, when I think about those words, I think,
I must have been levitating. I felt as if I was rising off the ground.
I knew that the second door was opening.
- NEWSREEL:
- The terror of civil war struck Cyprus in December.
On Boxing Day, the British came in to stop the bloodshed.
So, I thought, I'm going to do my best here.
And I'm going to make an impression. This is my big chance.
So, I went to the Turkish community.
And they were surrounded by the Greeks.
I managed to slip past the roadblocks and get in.
I could hear gunfire.
That was the first time I had heard, in my life, hostile gunfire.
And then, suddenly, out of the cinema burst a man with a machine gun,
and he had a raincoat on and a flat hat.
And he looked like something like a Sicilian Mafioso bandit.
And then people ran out with mattresses on their heads,
women and children, as if a mattress would stop a bullet.
And this was my baptism of war.
I had to assess very quickly what was going on,
where the fire was coming from.
As the day wore on, we were trapped in these empty streets.
There were groups of fighters, Turkish defenders.
And funny, curious things caught my eye.
I could remember a group of men behind barricades.
It was almost like the Spanish Civil War, really.
And by the barricade, there were men with an ill-assorted bunch of weapons
and old, almost muskety-looking kind of museum pieces.
But standing near this group of men was a beautiful dog.
I thought, "Why is it that these things come to you,
"when you should be thinking about more serious things?"
But to be truthful, these little things sometimes tell you
much more about a story than the obvious things.
So, I think what I'm getting down to here is,
we're talking about sensitivity.
What I had to realise at the time, I was learning a new trade.
I was learning about the price of humanity and its sufferings.
- NEWSREEL:
- Now, four months later, the armed forces of both sides
are still defying the UN's attempts to keep the peace.
And the Cyprus situation is as dangerous and complex as ever.
The UN is powerless to do anything
that would really help restore law and order.
I saw a whole village trying to evacuate, they were being attacked,
to somewhere with more safety, like a school building.
And there was this one old lady, who was lame, and she had two sticks.
And she really couldn't get those legs moving.
And there was a British soldier trying to coax her along,
persuade her to hurry up before she'd probably lose her life.
And I was with a friend of mine, I said, "This is ridiculous."
I took one picture of the soldier and the old lady,
and I put my cameras down.
And I scooped this old lady up in my arms.
It was like scooping up some rag doll that had fallen from a child's pram.
I just ran and ran with her. I don't know why I did it.
But I didn't really want to see that old lady shot down and killed.
And I went back to my position as a photographer, and I carried on.
But it made me feel good.
I it made me feel as if I wasn't just there as a voyeur
that was enjoying other people's misery and possible deaths.
It's a very fine line.
I've been constantly accused of taking terrible pictures
and people saying, "Did you ever help anyone?"
Of course I did. But I don't want to brag about it.
I did it sometimes to clear my own conscience.
These little battles were erupting all over
the northern part of the island of Cyprus, where the Turks lived.
We saw this soldier looking at the bodies, and I said,
"What's happening?" He said, "There's been some killing," he said,
"There's a dead body up there and some more in that house."
I knocked on the door, I tapped on this door and there was no answer.
And I let myself in.
And the first thing I was greeted with was warm blood.
These men had been murdered the day before,
and the warm, early morning sunlight had penetrated through
the glass door of this house.
And I closed the door and I tiptoed around the room,
and I got myself in a corner, and I was taking the first shot.
And suddenly, the door opened and, to my horror, the whole family burst in.
I thought, my God, they're going to be really cross, finding me in here.
To my astonishment, they weren't, so I carried on photographing.
And there was a woman who started screaming like mad.
And the truth was that it was her husband who was just below my feet,
who was dead. A new husband at that, they had only been married a week.
And the Greeks came the day before and attacked this community
and murdered these people in cold blood in this house.
I'd go into a village one day, and I got there in the early morning.
And they were finding bodies of Turkish men
who were defending the villages.
And then they were coming back to the village
and telling women that their husbands had been killed.
And then you saw these Goya-esque kind of poses
of people looking up to Christ.
I've noticed that a lot in wars.
When people are in deep grief and emotion, they look up
as if they can see God himself there, offering them some help.
And you see that in Goya's drawings.
Before men are being shot or massacred,
they look up, or they are praying,
and it's part of that religious nature of the great painters.
That moment is so classic.
I call it one of the decisive moments in photography.
Because it combines the news moments with the compositional elements
which make a photograph in themselves.
So, there is something, a second or two would have made a difference.
I asked Don how he took the picture.
As I recall it, he actually had to fall to his knees quickly to get it
because he just sensed it was coming.
I mean, OK, I talk as if there's a lot of poetry in me.
There isn't. I'm a photographer. I am neither an artist or a poet.
I'm a photographer.
And one of the things I've learned most of all, erm,
over and above photography,
the very best qualifications you can have when you are in this situation,
and you are exercising this duty as a photographer, or whatever, reporter,
is that it's much better to be on the side of humanity.
All this was coming at me so fast, this responsibility.
And I felt, almost from the word go, I got a grip of it,
and I thought, I understand what I'm doing for the first time.
I'm meant to be doing this.
There was a decree put out that journalists were not allowed
to leave Leopoldville.
And then I thought, here I am, all this way out here in the Congo
and now I can't even leave out of the capital.
So, I had it in mind, and I knew that there were mercenaries
operating up in a place called Stanleyville.
I quickly managed to discover all this.
I've been appointed by Mr Tchombe
to recruit a number, which I can't disclose,
of men to form a fighting unit in the Congo,
to dispel the present rebellion.
"Mercenary" is a dirty word.
This unit is going to change the meaning of that word,
and "mercenary" will now be a badge of honour,
rather than a dirty word in the English language.
I met one of these mercenaries, and his name was Alan Murphy.
And I said, "Could you get me some information about this?"
And I pumped him for how to get there.
And he said, what happens was, every morning,
a C130 American plane, under the CIA,
would take groups of mercenaries to Stanleyville.
And I said, "Could you get me one of your shirts and a pair of trousers,
"and if I sleep overnight in the hotel,
"would you kick my bed in the morning when you get the call to leave?"
And he did just that.
And I see myself now, many, 40 years ago, standing on that runway
with the early-morning rain shower that had passed.
And a man with a clipboard, who happened to be a CIA man,
asking people's names. And I thought, I've had it. I've had it, you know.
Then he came up to me and he said, "What's your name?"
And I said, "McCullin." He said, "You're not on the list."
I said, "I should be," and my legs were like jelly.
And he said, he wrote my name down, he said, "OK, climb aboard."
And I'd cracked this amazing no-go situation.
When I arrived in Stanleyville,
I could hear a lot of shouting and screaming,
people crying and gunfire.
And I saw gangs of boys who had been tied up, and they were being beaten
and shot in the back of the head and kicked into the river.
I was looking at all this.
I had my little camera in my bag, and 20 rolls of film.
And I thought, how am I going to bring my camera out now
and declare that I shouldn't be here and I'm not a mercenary?
Because it was a huge gamble.
And it was the Congolese gendarmerie who were killing these people,
torturing them, dragging them behind trucks on wires,
it was really terrible.
They were skinned alive, some of them.
It was a kind of wood yard, and they were sitting in a corner, shivering.
Knowing that any moment, they would be shot.
And then they dragged some of these boys out in front of me
and started brutalising them.
And I had no power, by the way, to prevent this.
I took a few pictures and I walked away.
I thought, you know, you have a moral sense of purpose and duty.
You have to work out which of those purposes and duty you are there for.
It's very difficult too.
You want to take this picture, and you want to stop it.
And it's a very difficult thing.
It came up more and more my life,
seeing people executed in front of me.
GUNFIRE
RAPID GUNFIRE
There was a man called Mike Hoare
who was battling on the other side of this river, the Lualaba.
He was in charge of Fifth Commando,
these mercenaries I had teamed up with.
So, I arrived on the other side.
And then, Mike Hoare came to me and said,
"What are you doing, who are you? Where have you come from?"
And I said, "I have to be clean with you now,
"I'm working for the Observer newspaper."
He wouldn't have understood the German magazine, Quick.
I immediately fell back on my English heritage.
So, he said, "I'll deal with you in the morning,
"I'm going to hand you over to the Congolese military."
Which one knew right away, that would be curtains.
He said, "I admire what you have done, but I don't condone it."
And then he totally switched his whole kind of attitude
and offered to take me on this journey
chasing these Simbas who had abducted these nuns.
And they were cutting them to pieces with machetes on the way down,
as they were fleeing from us.
And we caught up with them.
There was goodness in Mike Hoare,
but there wasn't much goodness in what he stood for, really.
He was there for the adventure and the money.
There was one mercenary Rhodesian and I was sleeping in the same room
and he had a whole box of stuff and I said, "Where did you get that?"
He said, "I've just blown the bank in town but there was no money in it, unfortunately."
Halfway through the night, I heard gunfire
and I woke up in a great sweat.
This Rhodesian had got drunk and shot these two African boys,
who were doing all the laundry and the cooking
for these mercenaries for breakfast.
I remember looking at one of these poor black boys,
he was about 12 years old and his eyes were open.
And I looked at the mercenary and he said, "They asked for it.
"I found a weapon on them." Which wasn't true.
You know, some of these mercenaries,
they just had a lust for killing Africans.
HE MOANS
I hated them in the end.
GUNSHOT/HE SHOUTS
When I came away from these atrocities, I kept thinking,
"How am I going to get through this?"
I love what I'm doing, I love photography but, you know,
this other stuff is really too awful to live with, you know.
And sometimes people used to say to me, "Do you have nightmares?"
I would say, "No.
"Only in the daytime, when my eyes are open and I'm awake
"and my memory is, you know, on full alert."
So when I see... I love photography,
I love being in my darkroom, but even my darkroom is a haunted place.
I go in there with the red light and it's like being in a womb
and I play that music, which is only classical music,
it somehow pleases me, but at the same moment,
it takes me down and down and down to where I don't want to go.
It's like as if I'm drowning in a very deep ocean...
..and I'm trying to get back to the top again to see the daylight.
So, you know, I don't just take photographs. I think.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
I would come back to Finsbury Park,
because unfortunately,
I was still living in quite poor circumstances with my new wife.
And then, when there were odd days when I had nothing to do,
I would go to the Wimpy bar and hang out with the same tribe, you know.
And then they would say, "Where have you been lately?"
I'd say, "I've been to the Congo with the mercenaries."
And they would try to humour me...
..but basically, they were almost putting me down,
as if I was living in a Walter Mitty world.
I did about four and a half years on the Observer
and things were beginning to slow down for me and I could also...
I started getting the taste and the need
to do much bigger, you know, international stories.
And a friend of mine called David King,
who worked at the Sunday Times, said to me,
"Why don't you come and join us?
"Why don't you come and do some work for us? I'll give you work."
So I did and he sent me off to the Mississippi.
BLUES MUSIC
It was an amazing part of the world, the Mississippi.
They had the sharecroppers,
the black people who brought in the cotton,
living in shacks and sheds, and then you had New Orleans,
where we basically, we arrived in New Orleans and it was amazing to see.
And there was a Ku Klux Klan rally one night.
It was like Hollywood.
There was the big fire cross burning,
these rather hateful people in these ridiculous kind of outfits,
smoking huge cigars and basically
saying, "Welcome," but, you know, at the same time intimidating us.
I managed to, you know, get a few pictures, which David King,
when I came back, put together.
You know, you can take amazing pictures,
but you still need to have them presented
in a way that the public can accept them and understand them.
That was my first assignment for the Sunday Times.
Roy Thompson was not a journalist himself,
but he was the best friend journalism ever had.
He was very proud of his newspapers
and he was so proud of their independence,
he had a card printed which he carried in his pocket.
So when Roy Thompson was attacked,
"Why are you papers publishing this?"
or, "Why are you putting these war photographs in the colour magazine?
"We advertisers don't like it."
He would pause and take out of his pocket a little card
and it said, it was a kind of oath he'd made, you know,
"The newspapers that I control will always be independent
"and will run professionally and I do not interfere in them."
So he would put the card back in his pocket and would say,
"You wouldn't expect me to go against my own word, would you?"
I was very privileged because I worked on the colour magazine,
which was directly associated with the Sunday Times newspaper.
And I had equally wonderful people there
who allowed me to just disappear and come back several weeks later
and on top of all that, allow me to edit my own material.
He knew he had the confidence that if he did his part
and took his photographs and reported with integrity
and accuracy and with a sense of composition,
that it wasn't going to be interfered with
or rejected because of some other concerns.
He trusted me and so it meant that I would try that much harder
for people who gave me this wonderful freedom.
So Roy Thomson, backing his editors,
was crucial to the career of Don McCullin.
MUSIC: "Tin Soldier" by The Small Faces
The '60s were packed with opportunities
if you wanted to go to war.
# I am a little tin soldier that wants to jump into your fire... #
Israeli soldiers, fresh from street fighting,
snapped one another at the Wailing Wall.
Pictures for girlfriends, or people from Tel Aviv.
# All I need is treat me like a man
# Cos I ain't no child... #
If they think that I've come back happy,
they know that I've got something ghastly to show.
And if I've got something ghastly to show,
it means that I'm trying to get the message over to people
that even though I like being in a war and I like being there
because it's a great adventure for me,
my duty is to be there for a reason, not just to have a bloody good time.
I covered the battle of the citadel of Hue,
which was the biggest battle I'd ever been in.
I mean, I wouldn't like to go through a year without being in a war.
And it went on for two weeks
and that was really the beginning of real madness.
I'm getting a bit bad, really,
because I'm looking forward to doing two wars a year
and if I start looking forward to doing two or even more a year,
I'm not going to survive.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
GUNFIRE
Sleeping next to dead bodies.
Looking at men who had been run over by tanks
and looked like Persian carpets in the road.
People with their brains hanging out.
Living under tables and sleeping in rat-infested rooms.
It was like, basically, going into total madness and insanity.
I stood for two weeks in that battle,
watching dozens and dozens of American soldiers being killed
and wounded and being dragged towards me.
They looked as if they'd been taken from a butcher's shop, with blood everywhere.
In the end, I became totally mad, free,
running around like a tormented animal.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
I've got to make sure that when they look at my pictures,
if it's on a Sunday morning after breakfast,
that it's going to hit them hard.
The very first man I saw in that Battle of Hue
had been hit in the face with two bullets.
And he had a bandage around him.
It looked like a child who had his porridge dripping down his face,
through this bandage, but in fact it was blood and not porridge.
Big, gooey chunks of human gore, just coming out of his face.
I put my camera up to my face
and he tried to move his head, this soldier,
but his eyes were screaming at me not to photograph him,
so I took my camera and went somewhere else.
There was no shortage of, you know, human flesh to photograph that day.
Our most vivid memory of the battle
was that it was one of the most intense battles of the Vietnam War.
Don came in and joined us and he just kind of showed up,
but what was unique about Don is that the other correspondents
and photographers would show up and, what I would say, snap and go.
They would take their pictures and then be out of there.
Don, for whatever the reason, decided to join with us,
stay with us and for several days, he became one of us.
On one occasion, on more than one occasion,
went out at great risk to himself
to assist with bringing some of our wounded casualties back
to where we could evacuate them.
His classic photo of the shell-shocked Marine
is a Delta Company Marine.
I dropped on my knees and photographed this man.
I shot five frames, each one singularly.
One, two, three, four, five.
There is not one blink of an eyelid. There's not one change.
All those negatives are exactly the same.
I have kept up with a sizeable number
of the Marines from Delta Company.
We get together periodically and that individual has not surfaced,
so I don't know his history from that day on.
PIANO MUSIC
DISTANT GUNFIRE
I photographed this giant American
who looked like an athlete, but he was throwing a hand grenade.
Within seconds, this sniper hit this soldier in the hand
and he had a hand like a cauliflower.
It was all busted and bursting open.
The picture itself almost defeats the anti-war feeling
that I was trying to put across,
because he looks the picture of manhood,
like a javelin thrower at an Olympic event.
Instead of that,
he was throwing a hand grenade which was meant to bring death to others.
DISTANT GUNFIRE
The one meaningful picture I took in that battle
was a man who had been hit in both legs, an American Marine.
He was being supported by two friends
and if ever I thought, at the very moment in my atheistic kind of mind,
that I was looking at something purely religious, was of this man,
who looked like Jesus Christ being taken down from the cross.
When it was over, about 50% of the Marines were casualties.
In my own case, I went in with a company of 120 Marines
and sailors and at the end of the battle,
there were 39 of us that were still standing.
So you can see from just those shots how chaotic it was.
After two weeks, I got back to the press centre in Da Nang
and I realised I hadn't taken my clothes off, my underwear,
anything off for two weeks.
And, you know, I had a beard and I was haunted-looking.
I took those clothes off and threw them straight into the waste bin,
my underwear and everything I stood in, and had a shower.
I think I could have easily broke down in that shower and cried,
you know, I was so...
..so drained and used and crushed by two weeks of seeing people dying.
And you know, I think what I'm trying to say here is trying to be honest.
You know, photography suddenly didn't come into the picture, even.
It had nothing to do with photography.
After a while, if you are that involved in that kind of situation,
it's not about photography, it's about humanity.
Still photographs do have this strong affinity
with the way we remember, so...
And the vibrations of a still photograph can be intense
and can last for ever.
I can remember that Don sometimes worries,
I know, about, "Have I taken these risks? Is it worthwhile?"
I can tell him it is
because nobody can trace...it's like throwing a stone in a pond.
The ripples go out and you can't say,
"This ripple was caused by this stone," but they are.
And I think the disenchantment with the Vietnam War in America
is powerfully reinforced by some of the photographers,
American photographers, including Don McCullin.
Photography is the truth if it is being handled by a truthful person
and I have to tell you that I have a lot of integrity.
I would never tell a lie.
I would never try to recreate something that wasn't real.
I did a picture once where I did recreate something.
It was the only time I ever did it,
but I saw some Americans looting the body of a dead soldier,
looking for souvenirs and mocking the body, mocking the person.
And when they went away,
having rifled all through his personal things,
I brought them together and made a kind of montage
of this pathetic possessions of this North Vietnamese soldier.
It's the only time I've ever done it,
but I thought I would make a statement for this soldier.
I have no shame about doing that.
I have this picture and I think it says what I was trying to make it say, that, you know,
"Hear me. I am just a victim of war."
I was trying to say this about this young man.
We had total freedom in Vietnam.
That, of course, made the Americans feel,
when the war finally came to an end,
that it was the media that let them down.
They felt a bit upset about that, because they had given us
every facility and all they got in exchange was, you know,
that public opinion turned against the war in Vietnam.
So if you go to Afghanistan now, you are totally controlled.
They are never going to be allowed to take the kind of photographs
I did in Vietnam of the real thing, the battle, the price of war
and the suffering and loss, so the whole rulebook has been rewritten.
And it doesn't come out in our favour.
You just said it's a rotten job
and yet you have, in fact, sought it out.
You've sought out war and famine and misery
in all the time I've known you, which has been a long, long time.
Yes, I did it because I thought it was just going to be soldiers,
and then when I got to war,
I thought it was amazingly exciting to lay under
a barrage of shells dropping on me, or a sniper trying to get me.
I thought, you know, that was a challenge,
and I have swum around with many dead bodies in canals
to get by them when the sniper is working a ridge for me.
I felt I wanted to put my fingers up and say, "You missed it, mate."
And, you know, I had a very cocky attitude about warfare,
but then I started coming in contact with the real victims
and they are always the poor people who are not informed.
They don't have the Mercedes-Benz to get away.
They don't have the communication or the money to move off quick.
They are always the very poorest people who get clobbered.
And the amazing thing is that is where I started in my life,
living with poor people,
and when I am with them in those circumstances,
I have a very close affinity and understanding of what their lot is.
# I presume you never noticed
# How much I really cared... #
You are friends, aren't you?
- You are buddies, aren't you?
- Well, we're all buddies.
Can you look where my elbow is?
I want to see your face, if you don't mind. That's fine.
You're OK, aren't you? You don't mind? You don't mind me?
I'm not bullying you around, am I? OK, thanks.
I don't want to take liberties, you know.
I could have spent the rest of my life working
in Aldgate and Whitechapel, it's all there.
Photographically, it's all there.
It is a totally, what do they call it...
..Hogarthian kind of experience, when you are doing these pictures.
PIANO MUSIC
This is one of my favourite pictures and I've never,
ever printed it before.
Look at these men's hands.
They are all standing up asleep, these men.
These people used to try and put the dead eye on you.
By that, they would try to stare you out.
You must never flinch away like that. You must stare them out.
This is a woman called Jean.
She used to hang out under the arches of Liverpool Street Station.
She used to curtsey when I went up.
She used to say, "Hello, Captain Mark."
I said, "Why do you keep calling me Captain Mark?"
And she said, "Because you look like Captain Mark Phillips."
She said, "Would you like some tea?"
And I said, "You haven't got any milk."
She said, "I can always get it outside of people's front doors."
I loved her.
In fact, what I did, I found her somewhere to live.
This is a picture I really like.
It's like a fallen woman from the turn of the century.
I did this in Chapel Market on Sunday morning when I was very young.
She's been a posh woman, this woman.
You can tell by the handbag, tell by the clothes.
They're all young, now. They are not old people like this.
I think one of the best portraits I ever did
was this man in Spitalfields Market.
He was actually lying by the embers of an all-night fire
that these homeless men used to congregate around.
He sat up and looked at me full-face.
I just held his stare and I just brought my Nikon camera up
to my eye and took this picture and he never moved an eyelid.
I was looking at the bluest eyes you've ever seen
and his hair was matted.
I felt as if I was looking at one of those Neptune images
of a man under the sea, you know, with a trident.
It was quite extraordinary.
So pleased with the picture.
MUSIC: "Blue Peter Theme"
This year it's a matter of life and death.
GUNSHO There has been a war going on in West Africa for two years now.
It's a civil war between the Biafrans and the Nigerians.
We're not going to say which side is right or which side is wrong,
except that all war is always wrong.
I went two or three times.
Aeroplanes that used to take in aid
used to land on an extended road, which was their airstrip.
It was called Uli Airstrip and you went at night
and the Federal Government had hired,
you know, Russian pilots and foreign pilots
to try and shoot these planes down.
This one is flying the other side of the mission church,
sweeping to the right.
Streaking the ground as they move,
dropping incendiary bombs and fragmentation bombs
in the places around here.
So, going in to Uli Airstrip at night was a very hairy experience.
There are crews out there willing to fly, despite the lack of permission
and we will just try and fly in.
- But you stand a good chance of being shot down?
- I don't think so, no.
They seem to have been fairly trigger-happy in the past, though.
Anyway, we are going to try and let us see.
Ms Ryder, why are you going as well?
Well, because one feels very concerned, clearly,
with anyone who is suffering any distress anywhere
and partly because one has seen a situation in Europe,
in the past, perhaps similar to this.
PIANO MUSIC
I walked into a camp which was actually an old school building
and there were 800 dying children, standing there, waiting for me.
You know, when you go into a camp with 800 dying children,
some of whom are actually dropping down and dying in front of me,
they think you're coming with some form of salvation.
They don't realise you're coming to take pictures and get information.
That's not what they want. You know, they want food.
I saw this particular boy that haunts me to this day.
He was an albino boy and he was standing, looking at me.
Barely managing to stand on his spindly legs.
When you're an albino in Africa,
you're singled out all the time for bullying and God knows what.
He was clutching a French corned beef tin,
some previous aid gift which he'd licked the interior completely dry.
And I thought, "I can't look at this boy." It was too much.
He was staring at me, so I went somewhere else
and spoke to a doctor, cos another child had collapsed
and was dying and suddenly, somebody touched my hand
and I looked down and it was the albino boy, he was holding my hand.
And I thought, "Why are you doing this to me?"
It was like he'd honed in on me and he was really paining me,
making me feel so ashamed.
So I gave him a barley sugar from my pocket and he went away
and he stood at a distance, licking this barley sugar.
There were children of two years old,
crawling around on their stomachs with their anus hanging out.
I've never seen anything so terrible in all my life,
the inside of their whole backside
had kind of invertedly kind of suddenly fell out
and they were dragging themselves around
with this inside-out situation of their bottoms,
with flies hanging on as they crawled.
I thought, this was worse than any inferno of insanity
that you could ever experience or see in your life.
It wasn't real, it was so horrible, so shocking.
And, you know, I almost become, well, I almost became paralysed.
I was so shocked.
I thought, "Take your mind off it. Take some pictures."
They said, "There's a girl you must see."
They said, "Her name is Patience."
They brought her in and she was completely naked.
She was 16 years of age,
days, if not one or two days, away from death.
And I thought, "How am I going to do this?"
And they sat her down and I asked the nurse
if she would place her hands over the lower part of her body,
cos I thought, you know,
"If I'm going to do this picture
"to show this terrible, shocking creature,
"I'm going to do it with as much dignity as I can rustle up
"and at least not take advantage of her nakedness."
You've never seen a more dignified person, you know,
you know, inches away from death.
PIANO MUSIC
And I remember one day seeing a woman trying to feed a child at the breast.
There was nothing for the child at the breast.
And I saw some writing at the back, in the far distance.
And after I'd photographed the woman, who, believe it or not,
was only 24 years of age and she looked like 65,
I went and read the writing in the far distance on the wall
and it had on the wall, "Today I am reborn."
And that little inscription took my legs away from me.
You know, you can go through so much as a photographer,
you put yourself there.
You don't ask, you know, you don't ask why you are there.
You go there and the same time you put yourself there.
You could refuse if you want.
I went there, but when I went there, I photographed these people
to show they had more dignity than most of us will ever dream of,
that being in the last throes of their life.
His awareness of the futility of it,
as well as the direct sight of these people dying on their feet...
..moved him enormously.
He always had empathy, of course,
with the soldier who was shot, but here he was looking at civilians.
Men and women without any clue about what was going on,
dying because of the ambitions
of some of the power-hungry people in the country.
MUSIC: "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd
# If I leave here tomorrow
# Would you still remember me?
# I must be travelling on now... #
I spent my whole life travelling the world. I was really on the move.
You know, I was constantly at London Airport
and waving goodbye to my little family.
# And this bird shall never change... #
I was very eager, as always,
and ambitious to get to the front of the fighting.
And the next thing I know,
we walked into an ambush and all hell broke loose.
GUNFIRE
There was tremendous, heavy AK-47 fire.
And I immediately ran down into the side of the road,
which is like a culvert.
And I thought, "I'm going to get my tail out of here."
Because, you know, what does one picture mean of a soldier under fire
if it's going to cost you your life?
For the first time, my nerve went.
I knelt behind a tube and there was an almighty explosion.
I was blown across the road.
I felt this terrible burning sensation in my legs
and everywhere from the waist downwards.
And all my past seemed to come before me and I thought, "This is it. I'm going to die."
So I crawled away for about 200 yards,
only to be put on the back of a truck,
having been stabbed with a morphine injection.
And then they filled the lorry up
with about half a dozen soldiers who were wounded.
I thought, "I'm going to take my mind off my own pain
"and I'm going to photograph what's going on in this truck."
They put the man on the truck right next to me
who took the full brunt of the mortar bomb that hit me,
but he got, unfortunately, all of it in his chest and stomach.
And he kept sitting up and trying to fight people holding him down.
He was fighting.
And he died on the way back in the truck to the hospital,
because I sat up and photographed him.
And I said, "I don't want you to take any more risks."
They took the risks as they judged fit
because they were independently-minded.
And I secretly rejoiced that they brought back what they did,
but nonetheless, the next time and the next time
and the next time, you thought,
"Pray to God that they are not playing Russian roulette with their own lives."
LOUD EXPLOSION
It was strange for me to get on an aeroplane and fly to Belfast,
drive to Londonderry, check into the hotel.
And you could guarantee that once the pubs turned out
at about 3-something in the afternoon,
that there you braced yourself
and you knew exactly where it would be.
It was almost like a football match. You knew where the action would be.
SHOUTING AND SCREAMING
It was bricks and bottles and stones
coming at the soldiers, who then fired rubber bullets
and CS gas back, and I used to be gassed on a regular basis.
But from a photographer's point of view, you couldn't miss.
It was like a theatre, really. It was like a play.
You knew the plot, you'd seen it many times before.
This particular day, I knew they were going to charge
and I was standing there with my short telephoto lens
and I took this picture of the "let's go and get them".
I wasn't totally aware that in the shop doorway by this taxi company
was a woman standing there, holding her mouth with total shock.
That made my picture much more poignant, really.
I came upon this highway
and saw these dying soldiers in the road, and I was with a very
nice friend of mine called Michael Nicholson, who was an ITV reporter.
Their wounds were kind of melting into the tar itself on the road.
So hot.
We prised them off the road and we draped them
across the bonnet of his Jeep.
And I stood on the front of it and kind of leaned on them
and we drove them back to a first aid medical centre for the army.
And we went back the next morning to see how they were, but they had died.
And I did lots of pictures of men coming in on that road
with pieces of cardboard around their feet,
because they threw their boots away
and, of course, they didn't last long on that road.
The whole thing was the most appalling shambles.
It was like the retreat from Moscow. Terrible disarray.
And so, when the Sunday Times published these pictures,
the South Vietnamese Government put me on a blacklist,
which I never thought for one minute existed.
I was building this reputation as a war photographer,
which today I really detest.
I worked for it and then,
when I suddenly felt that I was being acclaimed as a war photographer,
suddenly I felt uncomfortable and dirty.
I felt being called a war photographer
was like being called a mercenary.
Looking back on all that, I thought my family suffered very badly.
I was always waving goodbye to them and one wonders in their mind,
were they ever thinking, "Will we ever see this strange man again,
"who is supposed to be our father?"
But, you know, I didn't want to weaken my strength
by thinking in a sentimental way.
I wanted to do my job and then hopefully go home to them,
but it was very selfish, now I look back on it.
And it eventually ruined by marriage.
GUNFIRE
In Beirut's Christian stronghold,
Phalangist militiamen poured fire on neighbouring areas
held by Muslim leftists
and allies from the more extreme Palestinian guerrilla group.
Every day you had a twist in the Lebanon.
There is always something ghastly and new to kind of look at.
I did this photograph of all these Christians,
all proudly showing their manly side to them.
And the audacity was that they were wearing Christian crosses
and, you know, you think...
you expect more from Christianity
if you're displaying it in such a way than some of the terrible things
that they did in the name of Christianity.
On the political front, the situation still appears to be stalemate.
Efforts to implement a ceasefire clearly having failed
and parliament's attempts to hold a session...
The Palestinian areas, the kind of east side of Beirut,
right inside the Christian heartland.
And it was just, it was murder from the word go.
MUSIC
They started, you know, collecting prisoners.
It all happened so quickly.
I went to a house where I could hear a lot of women and children screaming.
A Christian was bringing the women and children down
the side of this stairwell and I could see two Palestinian young men
with their hands up, in the left-hand side of the stairwell.
The moment the women went out of the house,
the man next to me, and I was very close, you know,
very close, started opening up and killing these people in cold blood, immediately.
And they went down in a hail of bullets and blood, all up the wall.
And I went round the back of the stairwell, another stairwell,
and try to get a grip of myself, cos I was so shocked.
I couldn't believe what I had just seen.
I came out of the building
and there was another Christian gunman who had the women and children
and he said, "By the way, if I see you taking any pictures,
"I am going to kill you myself. Get out of here."
Everywhere I went that day,
I could see another person being murdered in front of me.
Of course, what I did eventually was get the picture of the man
playing the lute over the dead Palestinian girl's body.
They were so angry about it when it was published that they said
if they ever caught the man who took the picture, they would kill him.
In a way, it was almost an honour
that they wanted to kill me for taking the picture.
The 26-storey Holiday Inn is burning.
The third of a trio of five-star hotels
to be caught in the firing line.
This is the courtyard of the Hilton Hotel
and it was here that the fighting took place all last night.
When the Islamics overwhelmed part of the Christian area where I was,
they were actually ensconced in the Hilton Hotel and when they got in,
the Christians that they'd captured in there,
they took them to the top floor and they mutilated them
in a manly sense, by cutting off part of them, and they threw them,
alive, off the top of the building.
When it gets down to that kind of hatred,
it becomes a form of insanity.
It goes beyond your understanding of anything. Anything.
I don't know how he did it. He had a very sensitive conscience.
I would often call him "the conscience with a camera".
He had a very sensitive feel for other people's suffering,
which also gave him the impetus to feel,
"I can make people wake up to what is really going on here".
So the sensitivity which might have made him
recoil from the images was allied to this conscience of his which says,
"I've got to get this story. It can only be told by photographs."
His journalism, which is best when that cold eye of his,
if you like, was informed by the warmth of his empathy,
and by the text, which amplified the image which you could see.
It's an awful question to ask you, but do you think the images you take
of horror, of war, actually make anybody change their mind about it?
Actually, to be honest, I don't think they have.
I've been photographing war for about 16 years
and I've got very disillusioned.
And I've just had an exhibition
and the exhibition was mostly attended by very young people
and judging by the letters that I have received, which were many,
the people who wrote to me were very young people
and they are the people who care about war.
I think the rest of us, the middle-aged,
I hate to say this, people, they've had war and they've had enough of it.
I think they are sick about hearing about it now.
They think there is no solution, but the young people,
who are tomorrow's people,
they are more interested about trying to do something about it.
They feel ashamed of it and can't understand it.
I mean, why don't you settle for the easy life and earn 500 quid
a day taking pictures of ladies wearing bras and things?
- Or not wearing bras?
- I would probably get a heart attack.
LAUGHTER
Did you like this one? The sulky lover?
You would be if you had a face like that against you.
THEY LAUGH
This is one of my favourite pictures. I don't have many favourites.
It's a classic example of intrusion, of course,
but it's just showing the English.
The deckchairs says it all, doesn't it?
One thing about England, you can guarantee to find
all kinds of kind of crazy people in the summer.
There's not, I don't think there is a country quite like this country
for the diversities of people's manifestations.
You know, eccentrics.
You can get them by the bus-load here in England. I love it.
MUSIC: "This Is England" by The Clash
# I hear a gang fire on a human factory farm
# Are they howling out or doing somebody harm?
# On a catwalk jungle somebody grabbed my arm
# A voice spoke so cold, it matched the weapon in her palm
# This is England
# This knife of Sheffield steel
# This is England
# This is how we feel
# This is England... #
When the print unions sabotaged the Sunday Times,
they basically killed the paper.
The Thomson Organisation said, "We can't go on like this.
"We can't have the paper wrecked not only physically but economically."
So they put the paper up for sale.
And they had a perception, a judgement,
that Rupert Murdoch, with his history of being pretty tough,
would be better able to control the print unions.
And in some respects, that was a fair judgement.
You've had enough photographs. I think we really...
- And with Mr Evans.
- Mr Evans.
And though he made promises about the papers would maintain
their independence, he did not keep them.
And this, of course, was very, very bad news for British journalism
but it was also bad news, individually, for Don McCullin.
When Murdoch took over the Sunday Times
and Harold Evans went over to the Times newspaper,
we all felt that, you know, we were looking at the beginning of the end.
And I had had 18 fantastic years there.
The precious independence that he'd had and the ability to go
and tell an unvarnished truth through the medium of film
was now at risk, and so it proved to be.
MUSIC
The Falklands War suddenly appeared on the horizon and I thought,
"I want to be in on this, because for the first time in my life,
"I'm going to be in a big, international war with British soldiers."
You know, I thought I was the natural person
and to my astonishment, I was barred.
It didn't happen.
I was left behind and I was utterly miserable and devastated.
It was an appalling decision to keep Don McCullin off the boat,
creating the excuse that boat was full.
It seemed to be saying, "Your photography is so honest,
"so searing, so implicit with meaning, we can't take the risk
"of you accessing freedom of expression."
I thought it was the most appalling decision
and its effect on him was to seem to say,
"You've spent your life documenting things
"we don't think you should ever have documented,"
which, of course, was saying, "Why have you bothered?
"Why have you bothered to risk your life to try and tell the truth?"
That's the reason I went back to Lebanon,
because I didn't go to the Falklands.
The Lebanon War was erupting at the same time.
Cos, you know, I can always go somewhere else.
If I couldn't go to this war, I could go to another war, you know.
Cos I was suffering from what you become, a war junkie, really.
I was suffering from that problem, you know.
The massacres were carried out by an elite special security formation
of the Lebanese Christian Phalange.
The operation was, at all stages,
under direct control of senior Phalange commanders.
During that early stage of the massacre at Shatila Camp,
the Israeli forces fired a constant barrage of flares
to light up the camp for the Phalange forces.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
One morning in the hotel, very early,
I had a call from someone saying, "Are you Mr McCullin?" I said yes.
They said, "Will you come down to the lobby?
"We want to take you to the hospital at Sabra and Shatila."
They said, "About 21 people have been killed in this hospital,
"but we are not interested in that.
"We want to show you the worst aspect of what has happened here today."
They took me upstairs to the children's department
of the insane side of the hospital
and to my astonishment, there was one nurse who had stayed
for five days during this shelling and the others had fled the hospital.
And she showed me around and I couldn't believe
what I was looking at.
She said, "We've had to tie the children to the beds,"
she said, "because we couldn't cope.
"They would have got away and been injured."
And there were children tied to the beds,
covered in flies, in a heat you wouldn't understand.
So these children were lying in buckets of their own filth,
starving hungry, dying of thirst.
MUSIC
And she said, "There is a room with more children.
"I've had to lock them in the room and they are blind and insane,"
and she said, "They're only two years old, some of them."
And she opened the door of this room
and the heat that came out of it, you could've roasted a chicken in it.
And out swam, in their own filth and mess,
they were like blind rats, these children.
I don't think I was ever more ashamed of humanity.
I thought, "If this is what people can do in the name of, you know,
"Christianity or whatever, you know..."
Because the war was being conducted against the Christians,
or the Christians were fighting back and the Jews were shelling,
I mean, the whole thing was about religious madness.
Who was paying the price?
I wandered away. I was in deep shock and I thought, "I'm confused, here.
"Why am I here? What has this got to do with my original concept of being a photographer?"
And I wandered into another room just to get away
from all this horrible, horrible stuff.
And I saw a child sitting,
playing with bits of debris as if he had Lego.
I think it was a day of reckoning for me,
because I don't think I could have ever touched on more tragedy,
all under one roof, than what I saw at that hospital that day.
I've never forgotten it.
The sad thing about these days that I never forget
is that they come back, on a regular basis,
as fresh as it was happening today, to haunt me.
There is nothing so powerful as reporting.
The government can't find out the things that reporters can.
Certainly, many governments wish to suppress
what can be found out, foreign governments and sometimes our own.
So this is a very,
very important quality of Don's impulses,
which is the passion to report what is happening
and insofar as that has diminished today,
we've lost a huge amount
and I think there is still a tremendous appetite
for really good photojournalism, really good reporting.
Mr Rupert Murdoch, on budget day,
asked me to resign as Editor of the Times. I refused.
At no time have the independent
national directors sought my resignation.
But in the circumstances, the differences between me
and Mr Murdoch should not be prolonged.
I am therefore resigning tonight as the Editor of the Times.
The reason I got pushed out of the Sunday Times was simple, actually.
They had brought a new editor in.
A man called Andrew Neil, who was very ambitious,
and quite, you know, he knew what he wanted.
Most new editors like to kick off with a new bunch of people
under them, but he did say that there would be no more
wars in the magazine and in fact, it would be a magazine
based on life and leisure, you know, to attract the ads.
So I was one of the first casualties,
because when I went and photographed wars and Africa
and dying and starving children,
I was going to make sure that I got the strongest images.
They didn't always sit well in a magazine
that was trying to sell you, you know, cars and luxury.
So I was definitely on the way out by that stage.
I asked him about the occasion he was invited to
an execution in Saigon and as I recall,
he went to the prison where the execution was going to take place
and turned back and refused to take the photograph.
It was because of his really powerful humanitarian impulses,
he didn't want to legitimise murder in any way.
Since, actually, his entire canon of photography
is to delegitimise violence and say,
"Look, these are the consequences of your political decision.
"These are the consequences of your greed.
"These are the consequences of your carelessness.
"Look on these and think again."
I think his entire impulse, a humanitarian photographer
with tremendous technical skill, amounting to genius, in my view.
MUSIC
I'm nearly 75 years of age now.
I still have some energy left, not a lot,
but I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate,
you know, the things we've been talking about.
I'm just going to photograph the landscape,
and the English landscape, to me, is my heaven.
My form of heaven.
The one thing that upsets me about it is, like all other things,
there is always a threat surrounding the things you love.
When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, you know,
I think a tree is dying.
When I hear shooting, when there is pheasant shooting,
I think there's going to be some blood somewhere.
The sound of gunfire immediately switches on
another part of my nervous system.
So I feel, as much as you try to run away from these things,
someone always presses a button and says, you know,
"Here is a reminder of, you know, what you used to do."