Donald McCullin
[Photographer, b. 1935, Finsbury Park, London, lives in Somerset, England.]

 The colleges are turning out photographers like strings of sausages. 
 Photography will screw you every time it gets a chance to screw you, every time you put a roll into the camera... Sometimes I come back and find that the film has been damaged or that the camera’s back has been leaking. I don’t get angry, I don’t smash the camera, I just laugh and think: “It didn’t respect me, I wasn’t meant to have it.” 
 Someone may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares that it was a human being and it was a person—a living person. I care, and I’m going to photograph it—as horrible as it looks, I’m going to photograph it. 
 I like photographing the English landscape in the winter, because it’s naked and it’s cold and it’s lonely, and I feel lonely doing it—and yes, I feel as happy as anything. There’s no politics, there’s no one saying: “get off my land!” No one’s pointing a gun at me. It’s almost as if I’m drinking from the flower, as if I’m drinking the pure nectar of freedom. 
 I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness. 
 The photographer must be a patient and humble creature, ready to move forward or disappear into thin air. If I am alone and witness to happiness or shame, or even death, and no one is near, I may have had choices, one to be the photographer, the other the man; but what I try to be is human. 
 It’s not important that I record every tragedy that goes on in the world. But I decided to try a couple of shots. And I did something despicable. I wound the car window down and took the photographs from inside. Then I hated myself for not having the decency and courage to at least get out and do something. 
 People have always said that the darkroom is my womb, and I suppose that’s true. I like the consistency of the dark. It keeps me safe. 
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