The film 'McCullin'

McCullin – a war junkie by his own admission. Survived Biafra, Vietnam, Lebanon, Northern Ireland. I’ve followed his work since I became interested in photography as a teenager. But with Don McCullin, you can’t just be interested, you immerse yourself in his images. I’d read ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ – an account of his experiences as a Sunday Times photojournalist. I own a book of his photographs. But nothing could have prepared me for the film.

The camera lingers on his shots for longer than I could look. It forced me to confront the images. You can no longer marvel at the composition, his composure in taking the pictures amid chaos in the complete sense of the word. You are confronted by the Albino boy in Biafra clutching an empty can of corn beef. And you are confronted by McCullin’s words recounting how the children’s anuses were hanging out of their bodies. How they could hardly crawl, that they were basically dying before his eyes. And in Lebanon – in a mental institution for children – they couldn’t leave and the staff had been forced to lock some of the children up – so that they were swimming in their own faeces. Another image of the Christian falangists in Lebanon, saw them triumphantly celebrating with a lute over a dead body of a Muslim woman.

The relentless truth of these images, the relentless truth of McCullin himself is simply too much. The world is too much. This is a man who is haunted, and you see it in his face. He says he is not plagued by nightmares, but images and sounds plague him in the day. When his mind can’t escape his unremitting thoughts. His landscape photographs of Somerset  seem to be inhabited by the ghosts of war. They are beautiful but bleak. McCullin recently returned to war – to Syria. He’s 77.