Unreasonable Behavior Read online

  UNREASONABLE

  BEHAVIOR

  DON McCULLIN

  UNREASONABLE BEHAVIOR

  AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  with

  Lewis Chester

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © by Don McCullin 1990, 2015

  except the photographs on page 52 © Philip Jones Griffiths 1956, page 156

  © Kyoichi Sawada, page 201 © Henri Bureau, pages 296 and 297 © Mark Shand,

  and page 342 © Terry O’Neill

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This edition first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, Penguin Random House UK, in 2015

  A previous edition was first published in the United States by Knopf in 1990

  First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: June 2017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2696-2

  eISBN 978-0-8021-8959-2

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  To my children—Paul, Jessica, Alex, Claude and Max—with love

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: BECOMING STREETWISE

  1 The Battleground

  2 Children of War

  3 Dereliction in the Bunk

  4 A Shocking Liberty

  5 Hunting Dogs

  6 Tank Warfare

  7 The Murder

  8 A Faster Sidewalk

  9 The First Contest

  10 Delinquent Photographer

  Part Two: GOING TO THE WARS

  11 With the Mercenaries

  12 Search and Destroy

  13 First the Lion, Then Vultures

  14 Jerusalem

  15 Another Desert War

  16 The Battle of Hue

  17 Lessons of War

  18 Children of Biafra

  19 People Who Eat People

  20 Wounded in Action

  21 Besieged

  22 Rain Forest Genocide

  23 Hiding Behind the Camera

  Part Three: MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

  24 Prisoner of Idi Amin

  25 Handshake Before Highway 13

  26 Death on the Golan Heights

  27 The Tribe Who Killed Christ

  28 Waiting for Pol Pot

  29 A Christian Massacre

  30 Picnic with Abu Ammar

  31 Shadow of Doubt

  32 Earthquake in Iran

  33 A Short Walk with the Mujaheddin

  34 The Unease of Change

  35 White Towel from the Camino Real

  Part Four: THE END OF THE AFFAIR

  36 The Task Force Gets Away

  37 Breaking Point

  38 The Nastiest Place on Earth

  39 Heart of Darkness

  40 Of Love and Death

  Part Five: WARS AND PEACE

  41 Alone with the Ghosts

  42 Flying High and Low

  43 Aids in Africa

  44 My Phoney War

  45 New Frontiers

  46 The Road to Aleppo

  47 A Walk Around the Volcano

  Index

  PREFACE

  It has been twenty-five years since Unreasonable Behavior was first published and in that time many lessons have been learned. Honestly, I am astonished that I am still here. My survival also means that I have had a lot of time to look back, examine and regret some of the decisions I made.

  Now that age has caught up with me, I think I would have done things differently; I would not have squandered my love and loyalty to my family, deserting them constantly to go to war, thinking that somehow my work was more important than family life. This was, of course, scandalous.

  I still however attach enormous priority to my photography. I punish myself unnecessarily for my work. Yet it has bought me many rewards—mostly in the friendship of wonderful gifted writers, photographers, curators, designers and editors. They opened my eyes to an alternative world from the one in which I was bought up. Some of those colleagues had their lives stolen from them in futile wars. I often feel ashamed at the memory of those lives lost.

  People ask me about post-traumatic stress. I say that I use the landscape of the English countryside to eradicate the nightmares about the atrocities and vengeance that I have witnessed.

  Now in the closing chapter of my life, I am simply grateful to my good friend, the late Mark Shand, for introducing me fourteen years ago to my wife Catherine and her wonderful cultured family who were so willing and generous to embrace me and through whom I have learned a great deal. Out of this union I have been blessed with another lovely son, whose name is Max.

  I am lucky to have been given another chance to enjoy the time that has been left to me.

  Don McCullin

  Somerset

  March 2015

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With apologies to anyone I inadvertently omitted, I would like to thank the many people who opened doors for me and helped to enlarge my life. Today, in my eightieth year, as I write this for a new edition, inevitably many of these people, my friends, are dead. I would like to remember with love and respect, my mentor Norman Lewis, Bruce Chatwin, Eric Newby, the photojournalist Philip Jones Griffiths, and Mark Shand—my gratitude to these fellow travellers for shared adventures is immense. I miss them all. In more recent times Roger Cooper and Barnaby Rogerson have been enthusiastic and cultured travelling companions and thanks should go to Will Jones of Journeys by Design for helping to organise so many of my trips.

  At the start of my career, Dick Taylor at the Animation Studio was inspiring. From newspaper days, thanks to the following: Bryn Campbell, the Observer picture editor who first sent me to war, and the talented colleagues at the Sunday Times in whose company I grew up, to Michael Rand, David King, Philip Jacobson, William Shawcross, Jon Swain, Peter Crookston, Jonathan Dimbleby, James Fox, Michael Nicholson, Godfrey Smith, Francis Wyndham and above all, to my editor Harry Evans.

  I would like to remember my agent the late Abner Stein with affection and thank my new agent and sister-in-law, Natasha Fairweather, for her drive and professionalism. I should also acknowledge the late Tony Colwell, my editor at Cape on the first edition of this book. I must express my thanks to Lew Chester for returning to the task of updating that earlier edition to this present version.

  I am grateful to those who helped promote my work outside newspapers: the late Cornell Capa, who supported my work in America,
Mark Haworth-Booth for my first exhibition at the V&A, Hilary Roberts for the marvellous retrospective at the Imperial War Museum, Simon Baker and Anthony d’Offay for collecting and touring my work with the Tate. To my friends and agents at Contact Press, Jeffrey Smith, Domique Deschavanne and Robert Pledge—thank you, Bob particularly for being the brilliant curator of my European exhibitions. In the UK, Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery is a loyal and trusted adviser, as are Mark George, Aidan O’Sullivan, Marc Carter and Mark Holborn, whose creative eye on my publications is faultless.

  Charlotte Sorapure painted the portrait that is on the front of the jacket and many thanks to her and her artist husband Said for their company and hospitality in the hours of those sittings.

  Finally, I would like to thank my wife Catherine—‘the gate keeper’— for her patience and kindness over the last thirteen years, for answering the letters, keeping the diary and fielding all the calls and emails.

  ‘They are like candles that no-one will put out,

  or stains that cannot be removed.’

  Mark Haworth-Booth on Don McCullin’s photographs

  ‘No se puede mirar.’ (‘One cannot look at this.’)

  ‘Yo lo vi.’ (‘I saw it.’)

  Goya

  ‘To make you hear, to make you feel, to make you see.’

  Joseph Conrad

  Part One

  BECOMING STREETWISE

  1. THE BATTLEGROUND

  Two brothers met on a desert battleground on a February day in 1970. The elder was myself, covering my twentieth battle campaign as a photo-journalist; the younger, engaged in skirmishing with horse- and camel-mounted tribesmen of that remote African country, was my little brother Michael, then Sergeant, now Adjutant McCullin of the French Foreign Legion. For the short hour in which I could touch down in this arid spot, we met only to disagree.

  We both spoke from too close a knowledge of war, gained in a long separation from each other. Like Legionnaires, war photographers cannot avoid the front line. In the bars of beleaguered hotels in the world’s trouble spots where foreign correspondents gather there is sometimes talk of our seeing, due to modern means of communication, more of battle than anyone in history. Serving soldiers (SAS and mercenaries apart) are usually committed only to their own country’s conflicts; war correspondents go to them all. And photographers, unlike reporters who can often gather better information behind the lines, are generally found in the thick of the fighting. Those who stay with the work for a long time, like the great Robert Capa and Larry Burrows, often die with it. I stayed with it for twenty years, and by some miracle survived. By the time I met my brother in Chad I had lived in the front lines of Cyprus, the Congo, Jerusalem, Biafra, and many of the campaigns in Vietnam. I was to go on to see war’s depredations at Yom Kippur, in Cambodia, in Jordan, the Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, even in El Salvador. Many of my good friends lost their lives on these battlegrounds.

  It was perhaps the breadth of my experience that led Michael and me to differ. We had both been drawn to war by a sense of adventure, but its meaning for each of us had changed. To Michael, war was a game, a passion. Although it still held excitement for me, most of the time I could think only of its horrors. Michael’s attitude was the more explicable, the more soldierly; mine was less straightforward. After all, my engagement was voluntary, for I was not under military discipline. If war had become so hateful to me, why did I not keep away? I have even been told I must have some sort of death wish—and it is true that throughout most of my life something has forced me to go out and record death and suffering. But it is not through any yearning for death for myself, or any man.

  I still struggle with the meaning of all those experiences. Wars have dreadful differences, but also a dreadful sameness. You sleep with the dead, you cradle the dead, you live with the living who become the dead. Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see, is what my life as a war reporter is all about, and I have been criticised for forcing horrors into the view of complacent people. It has been said of my pictures of war and famine that ‘we know now that our knowing makes no difference’. Yet I believe that it is not ‘naive to think all that mattered’. Of course our knowing matters, and mine are far from the only photographs to have awakened the public conscience in recent years. I resent the idea—voiced more than once—that the subjects of my photography are ‘matters too serious for art’. I am also deeply suspicious of any attempt to censor communication of the truth.

  Even with all my years of watching, I have never been able to switch off my feelings, nor do I think it would be right to do so. Few are equipped to remain unmoved by the spectacle of what war does to people. These are sights that should, and do, bring pain, and shame, and guilt. Some sights heighten the feelings to an unbearable pitch. Once, when I was caught in a forward position with American Marines in Vietnam, a supply wagon bringing ammunition—a moke of the kind you might see on sea-side dunes—overshot our position in the dark. It stopped, and a sniper killed the driver, who stayed slumped in his position at the wheel, the engine droning on eerily. Through the night he was outlined by tracer flares from the other lines, unearthly in harsh yellow, orange and green. The incoming fire made it impossible for us to reach him. We watched in appalled fascination until dawn, when the battle died down and the moke’s engine, finally running out of petrol, puttered to a stop.

  Often in battle you think tomorrow it will be you, that you are going to be the one lying with your face to the stars. It is strange to think of a human body lying fixed in one position, staring at the stars without seeing. I remember being in a patrol when a burst of automatic fire brought down the two men ahead of me. I dived for cover, my mouth in the mud, my cameras covered with dirt, and I lay there, still, for twenty minutes during which everything in my life came back to me. At times like these, when men have died in front of you, and behind you, there is an overwhelming sense of them dying for you.

  It has been said that I print my photographs too dark. How can such experiences be conveyed with a feeling of lightness? Yet, I ask myself, what has all my looking and probing done for these people, or for anyone? How many times, as the fire was closing on my position, have I thought—Is this it? Is this the day? What have I done with my life?

  2. CHILDREN OF WAR

  Like all my generation in London, I am a product of Hitler. I was born in the Thirties and bombed in the Forties. Then Hollywood moved in and started showing me films about violence. At a very early age I can remember overhearing my father telling my mother about a severed head one of his fellow air raid wardens had found during the blitz and was showing around in a box. Gruesomeness of this sort was par for the course for Londoners during and just after the Second World War, and it rubbed off on the children too.

  The bombsites became our playgrounds. We went out hunting for shrapnel and the foil dropped by the Germans to deflect radar. We lived with nightly bomb terrors. Air raid shelters, like the one in our back yard, became our second homes. There was a pungent smell about those shelters—the smell of damp air trapped in that concrete shell. I lived that smell. I recall it today as fondly as other people remember the smells of summer, or of winter fires.

  Children played at war because war was all there was. I remember playing toy soldiers with my little brother Michael. We would draw them up in battle-order in the yard and take their heads off by shying clods of earth. I was later to remember this battle. The play was unnervingly like the real thing.

  My first home was just off the Tottenham Court Road, where my father occasionally worked as a fishmonger. The work was occasional because my father was an invalid. My mother had to make most of the decisions for us. When the family expanded, with the birth of my sister Marie, we moved to two rooms under the grille of a pavement in King’s Cross. This lasted only a few months before we moved to a tenement building in Finsbury Park, then known as the worst area in north London. Again we had two damp baseme
nt rooms. Marie and I slept in one, they lived in the other. There was a scullery and a tiny lavatory, half in, half outside. It was no place for a man with chronic asthma, or kids for that matter, but it was home.

  Don, 1936

  Don’s parents, Frederick and Jessie, Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, 1940s

  Don and his sister, Marie, Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, 1940s

  My most painful memory of the war was born of the attempt to get me away from it. When I was five, Marie and I were faced with evacuation. Michael, who was not born until a few years later, managed to escape. I remember the buses gathering at Paul’s Park Primary School to take us to Paddington Station. There were many tears, and mothers waving and giving advice to their children. We all wore labels and carried little brown cardboard boxes containing our gas masks. We were told that we were going for our own protection, away from the bombs, to a rural existence.

  As soon as we arrived in Norton St Philip in Somerset, Marie and I were separated. My mother had been promised that we would not be split up, but we were. My sister was taken to the wealthiest household in the village. People who had engineering companies in wartime were on to a good number. I was sent to a council house. My sister’s existence and mine in that same village were from then on quite separate. Where she lived they had a maid with a black and white uniform who used to serve my sister tea. I would go round and peep through her window. Although I was her brother, I was looked upon as one of those scruffy council house children and not allowed in. Looking back, I think it may have been the beginning of something you can see in my pictures—an attempt to get as close to my subject while remaining invisible myself.

  You soon become aware of, and resigned to, the position you have in society: the fact that I lived in a council house meant that somehow, for me, the die was cast. My sister was leaving us through the privilege she enjoyed in that house. My mother took the amazing decision of allowing her to stay on after the war as a permanent foster child in that rich family, who sent her to a girls’ boarding school in Weston-super-Mare. So my sister went to public school. You could say—as they did in Finsbury Park—‘Adolf Hitler done her a favour.’