I am not neutral about Don McCullin.When I was a photography-obsessed teenager,
he was quite simply my God. I well remember sitting in the back row at maths classes
in 1980s Yorkshire, covertly flicking through the school library’s copy of Don’s
Hearts of Darkness, transported from a dull world of equations and trigonometry – taught, for duffers like me, in a shabby, paint-peeling Portakabin – to the war-torn jungles of Vietnam and Laos, the darkly barricaded streets of Famagusta and Beirut, the Killing Fields of Cambodia and Biafra. Don’s work was eye-opening, shocking, exhilarating, frightening and deeply disturbing all at once; and for a teenager it was utterly irresistible. Moreover, it
spoke to a heady and thrilling world of photojournalism that I longed to be part of.
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Read Moreby Barnaby Rogerson
I have been lucky enough to travel with Don McCullin in both the Libyan and Algerian deserts looking for Roman ruins. Last year we decided to expand our horizons and drive through the Troad in north-west Turkey, and then hop over to have another look at the temple of Baalbeq in eastern Lebanon. We have had some wonderful successes in the past – like finding the Saharan frontier fort of Bou Njem at dawn – but there have also been some failures. On this latest trip, walking around the excavations of the Late Bronze Age city of Troy, talking excitedly to the director of the excavations about Hector and Achilles in the gathering dusk was a totally thrilling experience for me, but I noticed it did not have quite the same fascination for my travelling companion. His camera bag remained buckled up (always a bad sign) apart from one photograph of Hector, the excavation guard dog.
The next morning, I knocked lightly on the door of Don’s room to check he was up. It was dark, and we were hoping to catch the Roman statues in the site museum in the first light of dawn. The door immediately swung open, and Don appeared, bags packed, camera case to the fore. The shadow of a grin crept across his face as he met my glance. ‘Up at last I see,’ he said. ‘Only you could have slept through your mate making such a din.’ The mate he was referring to was the muezzin, calling the dawn prayer.
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