LONDON — “I’m not an artist,” the photographer Don McCullin insisted recently. It was an awkward statement, not least because Mr. McCullin was standing in the Tate Britain gallery in London, in the middle of a major retrospective of his work, which opens Tuesday and runs through May 6.

“I’ve been struggling against that word all my life,” Mr. McCullin, 83, said. “The American photographers all want to be called artists. I’m a photographer and I stand by it.”

Mr. McCullin started taking photographs in the 1950s in a working-class area of North London. He first shot his friends, who were members of the Guvnors, a local gang whose notoriety helped get Mr. McCullin’s pictures into The Observer newspaper. Within a decade, he was sent to cover violent conflict in Cyprus, and he has largely been unable to get away from battlefields ever since. In 2017, he went to Syria to photograph ancient temples damaged by the Islamic State.

Mr. McCullin said that he had no desire to glamorize war but that he could not escape what he had seen. “I feel sad my photos didn’t change anything,” he added. “As soon as one war was finished, another cranked up.”