The Landscape

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During the Vietnam War, the Cambodian government allowed communist North Vietnamese guerrillas to use Cambodia as a supply route to their troops fighting in South Vietnam. But in 1970, this government was overthrown, and an anti-communist regime took control. The new government forces fought against the communist North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia and the emerging Khmer Rouge. The US intervened with a bombing campaign targeting the communist forces. However, US bombs also killed large numbers of civilians and significantly contributed to the Cambodian refugee crisis, which saw 2 million displaced people. Sir Don McCullin was born in 1935 and grew up in a deprived area of north London. He got his first break when a newspaper published his photograph of friends who were in a local gang. From the 1960s he forged a career as probably the UK’s foremost war photographer, primarily working for the Sunday Times Magazine. His unforgettable and sometimes harrowing images are accompanied in the show with his brutally honest commentaries. McCullin's best known as a star photojournalist of the 1960's and 1970's, but he's also been photographing the Somerset fields for more than three decades. In this special programme he tells Mariella Frostrup why. "I was ready for the English landscape - it became my psychiatrist's chair. Having spent the last sixty years covering wars and tragedies, watching people being murdered and starving to death, I needed to save myself."

We’re meeting because Don McCullin CBE is being given a lifetime achievement medal by the London design festival. Previous winners include Vivienne Westwood, Dieter Rams and Richard Rogers. “It’s nice to feel the work you’ve done over 60-odd years is welcome,” he says. Both the online and physical exhibitions follow McCullin’s major retrospective at Tate Britain, London in Spring 2019, featuring over 250 photographs that celebrate the scope and achievements of his entire career. The survey exhibition is due to travel to Tate Liverpool later this year. Don McCullin is one of our greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London’s East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes. McCullin was deeply affected by the trauma of reporting from some of the most violent conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century. When he returned home from these assignments, he often turned his attention to the tough lives of people in Britain. He photographed communities living in northern cities like Bradford and Liverpool, focusing on areas that had been neglected and left impoverished by policies of deindustrialisation. Often these trips were made on his own initiative, rather than being sent on assignment by a newspaper. McCullin saw similarities between their lives and his own childhood. Although he was ‘reporting’ on poverty and social crisis, he also identified deeply with his subjects, picturing the lives of others as a means of learning more about himself.DM: Yes, it is a bigger palette. The Roman Empire as it was, was extraordinary, apart from the fact that it was based on cruelty and horror. . . . You know, when I’m in these great Roman cities, which earthquakes and time have destroyed, I like the fact that I am there, I am enjoying the challenge—but all the time I feel as if I can hear the screams of pain of the people who built these cities. It doesn’t go away. The Roman slaves were paid nothing. All they probably expected was a bowl of food. So when you’re in these remarkable cities, you’re not comfortable really. After a ten-year break from war, McCullin went to Iraq in 1991. He was on assignment with the Independent, to cover the Kurdish exodus from Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War. Disputes over oil production and Iraq’s historical claims to Kuwaiti territory led to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. A US-led coalition intervened and liberated Kuwait by February 1991, but stopped short of mounting a full-scale invasion of Iraq.

Fred Ritchin: Today we’re going to talk about you being a photographer, a larger career than that of a war photographer. Despite being a tough Londoner by birth, McCullin’s Somerset roots run deep – he first came to the county as an evacuee in the war and has lived near Bruton for many years. There are also scenes from farther-flung locations, such as Syria and India. Wherever he shoots, McCullin’s composition is dramatic and arresting, and the darkroom toning utterly breathtaking. Joe Cornish is one of the UK’s most well-known and popular landscape photographers, and this almost 20-year-old book gives an insight into his creative genius. Featuring 150 fantastic images, alongside his valuable insights on how the picture came to be made, plus technical info and the thought processes and creative inspirations behind each image. Cape Light: Photographs by Joel Meyerowitz

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Among those others is actor, director and UN special envoy for refugees Angelina Jolie. She invited McCullin to Rome recently to discuss her plan to make a film of his life, based on his 2002 autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. Tom Hardy was initially rumoured to be lined up to play him, but was apparently deemed too old. “She’s an incredibly lovely woman,” says McCullin. “She’s determined to make this. She said, ‘I’ve got an office in LA with all your pictures on the wall and I want to do this.’” Photojournalism isn’t quite dead then: it still speaks from the walls to Angelina Jolie. About the Artist Don McCullin is one of the most important war photographers of the late twentieth century, best known for his broad war reportage and critical social documentation. Between 1966 and 1984, he worked for The Sunday Times Magazine under Editor-in-Chief Harold Evans and Art Editor David King, it was during this time he released his most celebrated images. He has since expanded his oeuvre with independent trips to India, Africa and the Middle East, continuing to raise awareness of global humanatarian issues and war-torn areas with unflinching honesty.

Sir Don McCullin, photographer and 'sky stalker', talks to Mariella Frostrup about the landscape surrounding his Somerset house. When I was a very young photographer, I wasn’t even really a photographer, I had very little experience, I mean I had no experience of international affairs and a story of such a huge calibre, I went straight to Friedrichstrasse where the tension between the Americans and the Russians and the East Germans were really… the build-up was enormous and there were tanks and armoured vehicles from both sides facing each other, it was very serious. Well, these photographs were taken in 1961. It was the actual beginning of the building of the Berlin Wall. I arrived at Tempelhof Airport and went straight to Friedrichstrasse, where the tension was at its most intense. So here I was in Berlin with one camera, basically looking at the hottest new story in the world. Unusually for an exhibition of contemporary photography, every photograph in this exhibition has been printed by McCullin himself. He is an expert printer, working in his darkroom at home, returning time and time again to produce the best possible results. In doing so, he revisits painful memories of his assignments; of people and places that are impossible to forget. To coincide with the reopening of Sir Don McCullin CBE’s exhibition ‘The Stillness of Life’ at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the acclaimed photographer presents this special online exhibition of platinum prints. The digital curation echoes McCullin’s continued passion for international travel and the salvation he seeks within the British countryside. Spanning from the 1980s to the present day, the landscape imagery here ranges from flooding meadows and expansive local views across Somerset, to the Sonepur Mela Festival along the Ganges in India, and the Northern Arctic in Svalbard Archipelago. For McCullin, the landscape is a living subject. His photography engages the energy of the land—its history, character and expression—recording an intimacy and awareness of the fragile relationship between us and our natural surroundings.

In 1964 the Observer sent McCullin to Cyprus, where he had previously been stationed with the RAF during his national service, to cover the fresh outbreak of violence. The photographs he took were his first images of live conflict. DM: It was like what we would call a head-butt. It was about butting somebody in the head and showing them my images. Now I’m behaving in a much more dignified way. Naturally, I’m getting older and coming to the end of my life, so I’ve slowed down. I’ve reinvented myself. The reason I am doing these new landscapes, this new Roman project, is because it’s a form of healing. I’m kind of healing myself. I don’t have those bad dreams. But you can never run away from what you’ve seen. I have a house full of negatives of all those hideous moments in my life in the past. The Sunday Times Magazine sent McCullin on several assignments to cover the Cambodian Civil War. The military conflict ran from 1967 to 1975. It primarily pitted the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge), their communist allies in North Vietnam and the Viêt Công, against the Kingdom of Cambodia.