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PODAR INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL [CAIE/IB]

YEAR 9 –ENGLISH – INTERVIEW WRITING

TEXT C: Read an extract based on Don McCullin life and times.

Don McCullin talks war and peace

Written by Colin Jacobson
An evening with Don McCullin is never going to be a dull affair – he is a complex man who has told the
story of his life many times before. He is unfailingly polite and gentlemanly, but one detects a slightly
weary tone as he goes over the familiar ground. He often pre-empts the questions with clinical self-
awareness.

The story of McCullin’s rise from the impoverished backstreets of Finsbury Park in north London is one
of fortuitous good luck, but it didn’t start out that way. Born in 1935, he was just 14 when his father
died, after which he was brought up by his dominant, violent, and sometimes mother. During National
Service with Britain’s Royal Air Force, he was posted to Suez, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, gaining
experience as a darkroom assistant. He bought a Rolle cord camera for £30 in Kenya, but pawned it
when he returned home to England, and started to become a bit of a tear away.

Redemption came when his mother redeemed the camera, and MccCullin started to take photographs
of a local gang, The Guvners. One of the hoodlums killed a policeman, and McCullin was persuaded to
show a group portrait of the gang to  The Observer. It published the photo, and kick-started a
burgeoning career as a photographer for the  newspaper.

“That gang picture was the ticket to rest of my life,” McCullin reminisces. “£5 was the cost of my life
as a photographer – that’s what my mother paid to redeem the camera I had pawned.” Did she have
an instinct that the camera would be his making? “I don’t know, she was a complex woman,” he replies.

In his late 20s, McCullin developed a taste for foreign stories. Without being commissioned, he took
himself off to shoot a story on the Berlin Wall, after seeing the famous news picture of an East German
soldier leaping to freedom in the West. In 1964, The Observer asked if he would like to cover the civil
war that was hotting up in Cyprus. McCullin was elated. It was his first real foray into a conflict zone
and the photographs he produced were remarkable, arguably still some of his finest work. They
catapulted him into the international arena of photojournalism.

Acknowledgements: https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/02/don-mccullin-talks-war-and-peace/
CompiledbySeethaforEnglishTeam@PIS
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Unlike the popular image of a war photographer, McCullin was never gung-ho or flash. He went into
conflict zones with little equipment in a low-key, unostentatious way. He learnt quickly, as a first
priority, how to extricate himself from tricky situations and, just as importantly, how to smuggle his
film out if necessary. The writer James Fox said, “Don always knows when to leave, when to stay”,
something which McCullin echoed to Horvat.

“A sense of timing is the most important part of the life of a professional photographer,” he said. “I
have an uncanny way of being at the right place at the right time. And if the time is not right, I can be
patient, stay in that place for hours, willing things to come.”

He doesn’t have much time for the conceptual approach. “If you try to direct the world with your mind,
you won’t come up trumps. Out in the field, it’s all about having the nerve to wait. Most of my conflict
photographs are full frame, not cropped. It’s all about discipline.”

McCullin is searingly honest about the addictive side of war photography. “It gives you excitement, a
tingle, a buzz. And fear, too.” But while he has made occasional forays into war zones during the past
20 years or so, he has concluded with distaste that the ability to work as an independent
photojournalist has all but disappeared. He refuses to operate in a pack and is scathing about the
embedding of photographers in current conflicts, unable to envisage how he would cope with the
controls and restrictions.

Being a prisoner of Idi Amin was unpleasant. He was in the hotel swimming pool, waiting for a flight
out of Uganda when Amin’s goons came for him and some other foreign journalists. “They took us to
a notorious prison where hundreds of prisoners were being sledge-hammered to death every day. We
were kicked and beaten with sticks. It took four days for the British High Commission to get us out of
there.”

McCullin has only ever set up one photograph, and that was for a purpose. This was his famous picture
of a dead Viet Cong soldier surrounded by his few possessions. “There was a kind of insanity in the air,
there had been day after day of bloodletting,” he recalled. “I came across the body of a young Viet
Cong soldier. Some American soldiers were abusing him verbally and stealing his things as souvenirs.

“It upset me – if this man was brave enough to fight for the freedom of his country, he should have
respect. I posed him with his few possessions for a purpose, for a reason, to make a statement. You
see, I’d developed a mind by then, I was my own man and I’d got attitudes. I felt I had a kind of
puritanical obligation to give this dead man a voice.”

Acknowledgements: https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/02/don-mccullin-talks-war-and-peace/
CompiledbySeethaforEnglishTeam@PIS
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Whenever he gives talks about his work, he is always asked, “Have you ever stopped being a
photographer, put down the camera and helped people in trouble or danger?” He recalls the best
photograph he never took, while working on an AIDS story in Zambia. “I went into a hut, the conditions
were terrible. A woman was lying on a stinking mattress cared for by her sister. We’d just come from
a hospice where there were empty beds and so we suggested she should be moved there.” McCullin
went up the road to hire a van from the local market. While he and the driver were arranging the back
of the van, he saw the woman struggling out of the hut carrying her sick sister on her shoulders. “My
camera was in my bag, so I missed a great shot because I was doing something more important. I could
have asked her to do it again but I didn’t because I would have felt no pride in such a reconstruction.”

In these later days of his life, McCullin is preoccupied with the landscape and nature around him in
Somerset, in the West of England. He has described his love of landscape as “herbal medicine for my
mind”. He is scornful about fame, comparing it, tellingly, to a “smelling body”, but is honest enough to
admit he enjoyed it when it came to him in the past. He says he has not become rich out of
photography, but is rich in lifestyle, taking spiritual energy from his life in the countryside.

“Who wants a house full of dying people, 6,000 prints of dying people amidst all this tranquility?” he
asks rhetorically. He mentions in passing that he has been made a substantial offer for his archives
from the US, so perhaps these residual ghosts will be spirited away.

He now has a passion for classical music, listening to it in his darkroom, and he can hum his favourite
pieces by heart. “I feel at the edge of my journey with photography now. I’m older, more
knowledgeable, but I’m never satisfied, never arriving, always looking for something better to come.
I’m a lost soul without photography.”

McCullin once described the darkest side of his work as “a contamination of my mind that will never
leave me”. His life in Somerset is a kind of exorcism of this mental pollution but it is as if he cannot
quite believe his luck. He still seems to be looking over his shoulder from time to time, watching out
for danger, wondering whether this life that he has worked so hard to create will all fall apart, and he’ll
find himself back on the streets of north London, scrabbling for survival.

*****

THE INTERVIEW WRITING TASK:

Imagine you are the Student Editor of your school. You have been asked to interview Don McCullin,
who has been behind some of the most iconic images of our time. You interview him about his
amazing life and career.

Your interview should cover the following questions:

Acknowledgements: https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/02/don-mccullin-talks-war-and-peace/
CompiledbySeethaforEnglishTeam@PIS
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a) Sir, could you please shed some light on how and where this passion for a life behind the lens all
began?

b) Next, our viewers are keen to know about your career as a war photographer, the challenges you
faced, and how you overcame them.

c) Lastly, could you please share how you turned your camera’s focus to the landscapes of rural
England? What is your advice to your audience here who wish to follow your footsteps?

Base your interview on what you have read in Text C. Be careful to use your own words.
Support your ideas with evidence from the passage.

Address each of the three bullet points.

Write about 250 to 350 words.

Up to fifteen marks will be available for the content of your answer, and up to ten marks for the quality
of your writing. [Total: 25]

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Acknowledgements: https://www.bjp-online.com/2019/02/don-mccullin-talks-war-and-peace/
CompiledbySeethaforEnglishTeam@PIS