Chester Lewis - Unreasonable behavior: an autobiography

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 ONeill

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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 childrenPaul, Jessica, Alex, Claude and Maxwith love

CONTENTS

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 rewardsmostly 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 Shandmy 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 dOffay for collecting and touring my work with the Tate. To my friends and agents at Contact Press, Jeffrey Smith, Domique Deschavanne and Robert Pledgethank 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 OSullivan, 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 Catherinethe 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 McCullins 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 worlds 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 countrys 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 wars 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.