Unusually for an exhibition of contemporary photography, every photograph in this exhibition has been printed by McCullin himself. He is an expert printer, working in his darkroom at home, returning time and time again to produce the best possible results. In doing so, he revisits painful memories of his assignments; of people and places that are impossible to forget.

The famine in Biafra was the turning point. "It’s the cruelest death to see somebody starving." He realised war wasn’t his adventure – it was someone else’s tragedy. It’s this realisation which gives his photos their moral power. "You’ve got to start looking at this in a different way." Mark Holborn quoted in ‘One Man Walking’, The Landscape by Don McCullin, published by Jonathan Cape (2018) 2. Don McCullin quoted in Open Skies by Don McCullin, published by Harmony Books (1989)McCullin traces his lifelong obsession with depicting human suffering to his rough childhood in London. “People say to me Finsbury Park has been gentrified. I say it’s not possible.” Well, there’s a Gail’s bakery at the tube station now, as well as a cinema, a theatre and a thriving al fresco coffee culture. The eyes of McCullin, through bushy brows, look doubtful. FR: Is that because of what you’ve seen in life, or because of where you’ve come from in life? Are you talking about your life as a war photographer, or are you talking about the neighborhood where you grew up—a sense of fairness of play? In 1971 McCullin asked to cover the Bangladesh War of Independence after reading about the possibility of a million refugees fleeing into India. At the time, Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan and was under a joint administration with West Pakistan. This was established during the 1947 Partition of India, which saw the end of British colonial rule and the creation of two independent Indian and Pakistani states, based on the religious majorities in both regions. Following a British plan, Partition was a violent act of separation that displaced 14 million people and killed up to 2 million. It set the stage for the Bangladesh War of Independence and continuing tensions between India and Pakistan.

By 1971, Bengali people in East Pakistan were demanding increased autonomy and later, independence. Following demonstrations, thousands of troops arrived from West Pakistan. On 26 March, civil war erupted with West Pakistan’s launch of Operation Searchlight, a military campaign which forced an estimated 10 million East Pakistani civilians to flee to India or face death. However his greatest asset was his instinctive sense of what made a great photo. He calls himself a travelling inquisitor, "turning over stones and seeing if there’s any life underneath them, like you do as a child on a beach." Following an impoverished north London childhood blighted by Hitler’s bombs and the early death of his father, McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv’nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design.These images will be displayed alongside a series of gelatin still life compositions, composed by McCullin in his garden shed and developed in his dark room at home. McCullin often refers to these still lifes as providing a deeper form of escapism than his landscapes, drawing inspiration from the great Flemish and Dutch renaissance masters. It is the emotional durability and intuitive presence of McCullin throughout the entire journey of image making, from capturing to developing, that allows us a rare insight into the redemption he has found from the land and place he calls home. So now my challenge is the landscape, the archaeological landscape of Rome . . . it’s very challenging and it’s very beautiful. When I can get into the pariah nations—Syria and Lebanon, they’ve eased up a bit, though Syria is a notorious police state—but when I’m there, I am totally safe and alone. I am constantly pushing the barriers, simply for the privilege of getting my cameras out and taking beautiful photographs. And in England we have this class structure. It’s very much there—though it’s being exchanged for new racial structures and religious structures that have come in. England is quite a racial country: it was never really on your side if you didn’t have white skin. So I grew up with all those things, and I’m still living with them, even though I live in the countryside. There are many hurdles in my country; you’re never really going to be free of the hurdles. McCullin’s pictures can often rest upon cruel contradictions and absurdities. In a scene of horror from Beirut in 1976, a group of young Phalangist fighters, one strumming a mandolin, appear to rejoice amidst the slaughter, a singing troupe indifferent to the remains of the dead Palestinian girl before them.

Was he ever scared for his life? “You’re on a tightrope on a very high wire,” he says. “One slip and you’re done for. When I was working in those places, I was constantly swivelling my head and eyes around to make sure that my intrusion was very limited. I had to get the pictures, but one false move could get you into all kinds of trouble – maybe even killed. That kind of life is gossamer-thin with danger.” In 1961 McCullin travelled to Germany to photograph the building of the Berlin Wall. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Germany was split into four zones, controlled by Britain, the US, France and the Soviet Union. The three western areas formed West Germany. The Soviet-controlled zone became East Germany. Berlin, located in the east, was similarly divided. The city, and the Wall in particular, became a striking symbol of the Cold War between the US, the Soviet Union and their respective allies, as both sides struggled for global supremacy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 signalled the end of the conflict, and Germany was reunified less than a year later. Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.” When I was a very young photographer, I wasn’t even really a photographer, I had very little experience, I mean I had no experience of international affairs and a story of such a huge calibre, I went straight to Friedrichstrasse where the tension between the Americans and the Russians and the East Germans were really… the build-up was enormous and there were tanks and armoured vehicles from both sides facing each other, it was very serious. Among those others is actor, director and UN special envoy for refugees Angelina Jolie. She invited McCullin to Rome recently to discuss her plan to make a film of his life, based on his 2002 autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour. Tom Hardy was initially rumoured to be lined up to play him, but was apparently deemed too old. “She’s an incredibly lovely woman,” says McCullin. “She’s determined to make this. She said, ‘I’ve got an office in LA with all your pictures on the wall and I want to do this.’” Photojournalism isn’t quite dead then: it still speaks from the walls to Angelina Jolie.

I photograph landscapes now. I’m not a man at peace. I still carry guilt and pain within me. Landscapes take my mind off all I’ve seen. It’s like therapy. It’s healing. DM: It was like what we would call a head-butt. It was about butting somebody in the head and showing them my images. Now I’m behaving in a much more dignified way. Naturally, I’m getting older and coming to the end of my life, so I’ve slowed down. I’ve reinvented myself. The reason I am doing these new landscapes, this new Roman project, is because it’s a form of healing. I’m kind of healing myself. I don’t have those bad dreams. But you can never run away from what you’ve seen. I have a house full of negatives of all those hideous moments in my life in the past. Photojournalism is dead. We’ve become obsessed with glamour and gloss: footballers, narcissism and gossip. Nobody wants the pictures I used to take. The civil war in Cyprus was his first conflict and encounter with the dead in warfare. The power of his pictures showing the bodies of Turkish Cypriot men killed in their home was dependent upon him also showing their family’s vivid expressions of grief. It was in relation to this experience that he has spoken about the beginnings of “self-knowledge”, stepping away from feelings of resentment over his life being uniquely tough and “learning empathy”. Don McCullin: I’d like to get away from the awful reputation of being a war photographer. I think, in a way, it’s parallel to calling me a kind of abattoir worker, somebody who works with the dead, or an undertaker or something. I’m none of those things. I went to war to photograph it in a compassionate way, and I came to the conclusion that it was a filthy, vile business. War—it was tragic, and it was awful, and I was witness to murder and terrible cruelty. So do I need a title for that? The answer is no, I don’t. I hate being called a war photographer. It’s almost an insult.