Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]
I felt I had seen so much horror that it was likely to destroy me…. Yet… I cannot do without the head-on collision with life I have when I am working.
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.
...there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don’t practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: “I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.” That’s why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.
Who needs great pictures when somebody’s dying and he’s only five years old?
(On his own photographs of starvation in Biafra)
I don’t want to be called an artist, I don’t have the right to practice creativity at the expense of human suffering. Nevertheless I shoot my pictures to the best of my ability.
I don’t make any protest other than to take photographs and show how bad it is.
There is no doubt that my photographs have a very strong religious overtone, they are like twentieth century icons. When human beings are suffering, they tend to look up, as if hoping for salvation. And that’s when I press the button.
You could easily cut yourself on me if you ran your hands down the edge of me.
