Don McCullin has covered wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Cyprus, El Salvador, the Congo and Syria. Last month he turned 80 while photographing in Iraq for Harper’s Magazine.

The documentary film “McCullin” by Jacqui Morris had its American debut at the Museum of Modern Art this week, and an updated version of the book “Don McCullin” was reissued this year by Aperture.

Mr. McCullin, who is represented by Contact Press Images, spoke this week with Michael Kamber, who has photographed conflict in Africa and the Middle East for The New York Times and is the founder of the Bronx Documentary Center. Their conversation has been edited.



Q.

I’ve always had a copy of your book.

A.

It never actually went anywhere in America, the Americans didn’t understand it. America has never taken me to its heart. I’ve always been an outsider.

Q.

I think certainly in the war community, and in the community of combat photographers, you’re held in very high esteem.

A.

Many people send me letters in England saying, “I want to be a war photographer,” and I say, go out into the community that you live in. There’s wars going on out there, you don’t have to go halfway around the world on an airplane where there are bombs and shells. There are social wars that are worthwhile. I don’t want to encourage people to think photography is only necessary through the tragedy of war.

Q.

Why do you think these people, especially young men, who come to me all the time, want to shoot war?

A.

I think they feel that they have to prove something, that’s the first thing. The only thing they have to prove to other photographers is that they have a good pair of eyes.

There are so many things that I’ve seen with my age. There are many dangers in war that don’t have to do with incoming shells, it has to do with being kidnapped, and murdered, and held to ransom, and chained to radiators for five years with people beating you and starving you. It’s so complex now, war is totally different.

Q.

How is war different?

A.

As I found out in Iraq a couple of weeks ago, you don’t see people fighting on the streets anymore. They all work inside, cocooned inside tunnels and houses. They punch holes in the walls.

You don’t see anybody running around. You hear incoming and outgoing small-arms fire, but you can’t tell where it is coming from. It’s coming from snipers in cracks in the wall, so photographing war now is incredibly difficult.

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Q.

You say in the book that in Lebanon both sides had a certain respect for the media because they needed you. There was some need for the media, but today that seems to have changed.

A.

I think media has lost its way. We must recognize that the proprietors of these organizations have put on a form of censorship. Basically they’re more interested in celebrity, narcissism, rich people, good-looking people and successful sportsmen.

The media should be a servant of the public. It should be there to protect us. To make us aware of where things are going wrong in our society. We always need wiser people, because at times we are sadly blind people.

Q.

You’ve said photos don’t make a difference; why did you go back and photograph war in Iraq?

A.

Because I read the newspapers and have a political thirst as well.

I started out as a 15-year-old boy in London. I went to work on a steam train, and I came from a poor background, I had no education, I had dyslexia, I came from a violent background. I was paying taxes at the age of 15. I started out on photography accidentally. A policemen came to a stop at the end of my street and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That’s how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with.

I didn’t choose photography, it seemed to choose me, but I’ve been loyal by risking my life for 50 years.

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Q.

But you went back to Syria, you went back to Iraq after you said photographs don’t change anything.

A.

I’ve been involved in Middle East wars for years and years, and it’s in my blood to poke my nose in.

I’ve been to all of those wars in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and El Salvador, and two Israeli wars, and wars in the Congo, and I think I know about war. I think I know about it. I’ll never understand why I’m drawn to it.

I feel guilty that I’m drawn to it because I keep telling people, it’s done no good, my imagery. All it’s done is encourage other young men to go to war and take amazing pictures.

Q.

We can only imagine what history would be if there was no evidence.

A.

That’s what people say, but the only pictures that came out of the Holocaust was a scattering of pictures. The two best pictures that came out of the Holocaust were one of a little boy in Warsaw surrendering to the Germans, and there was another picture of a family with a rather beautiful woman with a coat on, walking with the ghetto on fire behind. They were obviously taken by German officers. We had to wait until after the war to see the real horrendous tragedy of the camps.

I was only 10 years old when that war finished, and it made a big impression on me. Then, in my teens, I looked at Hollywood films where people were shot and there was no sign of blood. I was watching a John Wayne film, “The Green Berets,” and he was going out to dinner in Saigon with a white tuxedo. In real life you’d die of perspiration.

How the public gets taken for fools by Hollywood and all kinds of other media, I’m not only contemptuous, but I’m very suspicious, I trust nobody.

Q.

Do you spend time on the Internet looking at photos? Because there are so many photos being created now.

A.

Sadly because of that, photography, like war, is also going in another direction. It’s kind of fanning out and I think it’s bringing a broader vision, but a weaker impact. It’s as if you’ve poured a pint of water in your coffee. They’re still calling it coffee, but it’s mostly water.

The trouble with photography is that it’s been hijacked by the art world. I’m a photographer, I’m very happy with the title, I’m not an artist.

Of course I can sell my pictures, and print all of my own work. I’m paying someone to make platinum prints, but not of my war pictures, just my pastoral landscapes. I did a book about the Roman cities of North Africa about five years ago, it’s called “Southern Frontiers.”

Everything I touch seems to crumble. I went to a city called Palmyra [in Syria] and three or four weeks ago, they blew up one of the main temples and they blew up the funeral towers in the back row. The last time I was there in 2005 I went to the museum, which was inside the site.

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Q.

They killed the curator.

A.

Yes. He was 84 and they cut his head off, and hung up his body and put his head underneath. He was a lovely man. He gave me tea in his office.

I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I came to a crossroads and thought, what am I going to do with myself? I’ve got to find something new. This war photographer stuff really gets on my nerves. That’s the title I really don’t like, the “war photographer.”

Q.

Why?

A.

Because it has a mercenary ring about it. It’s associated with death, war. Of course I take war pictures occasionally, but I don’t want to be looked upon as some ogre or some weirdo.

Q.

How has the digital revolution affected war photography?

A.

Because photographers don’t want to go to Syria anymore — wisely — all of the pictures coming out of there are being done on phones. And quite a lot of men have lost their lives.

You can move telegraph wires and poles with digital, you can do anything. It’s open to the most terrible, appalling lies and propaganda.

Q.

Has it made professional photojournalists irrelevant? Or is there more need for us?

A.

I think less relevant, but they’re still clinging to it, to some charitable honesty. I think photography has changed, and there’s this danger now of stuff being called art. I think newspapers are not going to last for much longer. That’s my fear because of the Internet. Everything is going to go on the screen.

I’m not the authority on everything. I’m still struggling with my past and lack of education. I’m slightly insecure about what I should or shouldn’t be saying.

Q.

But you’ve been all over the world and you have firsthand knowledge that few people alive have.

A.

The other day I photographed a man in a hospital. He was a mine clearance guy who had an arm and a leg missing. He came from the Iraqi side of Kurdistan. He said, “I wouldn’t be like this now if the Americans had persuaded Baghdad to send some armor up here so we could have some protection.” The Kurds have nothing, so they are in an impossible position.

Q.

Tell me more about the book.

A.

Do you know this book was first done 26 years ago? It’s been re-updated with five more chapters.

You see this man [pointing to the book]? His name was Col. Myron Harrington, from the Deep South of America. One day in Vietnam we had some incoming mortars and myself and another man jumped in a trench to take cover, and there was a terrible smell. I look down and I see the buttons of a dead North Vietnamese soldier that I’m sitting on.

Do you know the film “All Quiet on the Western Front” where the man dies in the pit? I thought, war is like that, really. War has its own nature of reproducing the same events because that’s what war is: It’s the same events. And then me and this American said, “Jesus Christ!” and we ran out of there. To actually be sitting on a dead man’s stomach that was covered in a film of dust, it goes beyond photography, it goes beyond humanity, it goes beyond psychology.

The only answer or conclusion that you can come to is total insanity. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? I want to be a photographer, but why am I sitting on a dead man’s body? It’s very heavy baggage to be carrying when you set out to be a photographer.

Do you miss it?

Q.

I miss the adrenaline, I miss the camaraderie. You’re on the front edge of history; you’re not reading about it the next day.

A.

That’s why I went to Iraq.

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