Interview with Don McCullin - "Goya..."

[johnastovall]

Here is the Transcript of a BBC3 interview with Don McCullin, considered by many as the UK's finest War Photographer.

There is also an audio version.

" In the 20 years or more that he lived with death, often those of his close friends and colleagues, or diced with death personally but cheated him, just, McCullin never lost his own humanity, his care for the people, the soldiers, the victims whom his lenses caught in the most agonising of extremities. He did it through possessing a mixture of qualities, summed up as: 'the balls of a commando, the cunning of a rat, the eye of an artist, the anger of a man with his eyes open, so that anger finally threatened to consume him.' John le Carré has said he would rather watch any amount of TV battle footage than have to leaf through one of McCullin's albums of human suffering. Visitors to one of McCullin's exhibitions have been seen to walk around in floods of tears; and he himself offers this explanation: Photography isn't 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. The legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, came up to McCullin at one of his exhibitions and said simply, 'I have one word to say to you: Goya'...."