Entry into my attic at home is on invitation basis only and admission is usually approved by my father. It is home to a multitude of his memories and, as I understand, memory becomes something you value and protect when you’re on the cusp of seventy. There lies his childhood model railway, an unopened Fleetwood Mac vinyl and a collection of cinema’s finest moments, from Woody Allen’s earliest to Wes Anderson’s latest. Overwhelming though, there are scatterings of items that attest to his career as a photographer. Dust-covered negatives and discontinued models, a fitting tribute to a bygone era where film was supreme. Yet amongst this lies your archetypal camera: an homage to Japanese camera manufacturing, a weighty, compact construction of stainless steel – the Nikon F. Sadly, I don’t associate this metallic joy with the works of my father, but instead with one man only: Don McCullin.

It is 1970 and Don McCullin is trawling through a damp rice field in Cambodia, documenting the rise of the Khmer Rouge as they embark on systematic social engineering that brings devastation to society. As he draws the viewfinder of his Nikon F to his eye the metallic casing smacks him in the face and the bullet of a sniper ricochets off ; the camera defies death. It is a tale for the purists amongst us, overly apt; just as if it had been an artist’s easel or a priest’s bible. Despite this moment of fortune, in a career that spanned two decades and has earned him recognition as a highly revered, intrepid and unorthodox photojournalist, whilst working in war zones from Palestine to Baifra, he has never once carried a weapon. Unlike his contemporaries, he made a conscious decision to never leave room for a gun in his camera bag. Oddly, it seems that to possess a gun is to confront death, to engage and acknowledge it, and so he was resolute that his experience with death would be from behind the lens. Perhaps this was key to his survival, that he remained an onlooker, rather than a participant in all the bloodshed that he observed.

In a career spanning two decades McCullin dominated double-spread features in the Sunday Times Magazine and is no doubt responsible for the establishment of the publication as mandatory weekend reading. He has been shredded by shrapnel in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda and enveloped by gas in the upheavals of Northern Ireland. He has smoked pot with soldiers in Vietnam, drunk with the homeless in London and prayed with the people of Palestine. His main focus, he maintains, is the depth of humanity, documenting the savagery and the suffering we are capable of. McCullin’s work was different though. He found beauty in these discoveries; beauty in the tears that old men wept for one another and beauty in the wounded newborns that women cradled. He had the capacity to look fixedly into people’s retinas and draw deep from them, both woeful and welcoming sentiment and amongst the wretchedness that most people attribute to these moments he was able to recognise benevolent warmth. He stresses that he never wants to cause harm with his photos. You can be the master of your emotion as long as the image contaminates your mind somehow.

McCullin once described how he ‘used to chase wars like a drunk chasing a can of lager,’ but now he continually protests against his label as a ‘war photographer’. His Shellshocked US Marine in Hue, Vietnam is perhaps one of the most famous images of twentieth century warfare, and so it is unusual for a man whose name is synonymous with conflict, to be unable to recognise his achievements, such is the character if the man.. Part of this objection has been emphasised by his move into landscape photography. Once again, and unconventionally, these are not flamboyant depictions nor are they shot in adventurous settings. They are largely scenery shots of Somerset: black and white, charged with both contrast and mood. A reflection of McCullin’s troubled mind. He is honest that these landscapes are a method to find peace. He has said how every so often, whilst photographing, a local shotgun sounds in the blissful countryside and he is flung back to the bullets of the Belgian Congo or the deafening silence of Viet Cong shells, and he suffers flashbacks to the pain of the figures immortalised in his memories.

In spite of all this torment and for all his unorthodoxy – his dances with death, his insights into empathy and his suspicion of his own career, McCullin has surpassed another unlikely threshold and is living into his eighties. Few have lived a life so long and equally as fulfilled.