Many of Don McCullin’s peers consider him peerless. Some refer to him, at 88, as the dean of war photography. It’s a moniker he loathes because his images have always been assertively anti-war. In 2016, Vanity Fair went so far as to place him on “war photography’s Mount Rushmore.” And a year later, Queen Elizabeth II knighted the British-born McCullin “for services to photography.”

The achievements keep coming. Since October, his work has been showcased in a retrospective exhibition at the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma. And his photography is the subject of three new collections: Life, Death and Everything in Between; Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor; and Don McCullin: Le Monde dans le Viseur.

Recently, photojournalist Mark Edward Harris sat down with McCullin to discuss his oeuvre, their fellow photographers, and conflicts past and present. (On assignment for Vanity Fair, Harris has covered North Korea as well as the aftermath of both the 2011 Japanese tsunami and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.)

Mark Edward Harris: Two decades ago you wrote that you had come to the conclusion that “humanity will go on suffering until the end of time.” Have any events since then changed your opinion?

Don McCullin: I’m more convinced. Because I’ve been watching the war in Ukraine, which has been overtaken by the tragedies in Israel and Gaza. I’ve always said that when one war would be finished, there would always be another war waiting. And I’ve been proven quite right over the many years I’ve been covering wars. It also brings me to the point of thinking most of the work I’ve been involved in is partly useless. Because people that look at my pictures are normally decent human beings who are already anti-war people. So what good have I done when wars continuously go on, year in and year out, without any chance in my lifetime of ever seeing any peace in the world?

Was the purpose of covering all those wars to bring the reality of it to people so there would be a reaction against it?

In the beginning, no. I was a young photographer, ambitious and hungry for the opportunity to go cover these exciting wars. Then I realized that I was showing the wrong attitude. I was behaving and thinking in the wrong way—until 1968, when I walked into a school complex during the war in Biafra and saw several hundred children dying in front of me. There and then it stopped me in my tracks. I had been indulging myself in this extraordinary life of excitement, going here, there, and everywhere. Suddenly, I was confronted by these dying children, and it was a wake-up call that was very necessary for me.

The photo of the emaciated 24-year-old Biafran woman breastfeeding her child is one of the many heartbreaking images you took that day.

There were many other photos, but that’s the one that really illustrates a danger in making an iconic image. You have a confrontation within yourself to be careful: What am I doing here? Am I trying to show the worst of this situation or glamorizing the beauty of the tragedy by composing my picture too well? There are so many ingredients you can mess up on, and I think I slightly messed up that day. That woman looked like 60 years of age, and yet there was a dignity in her that tried to take away the tragedy in that moment. It was the way I composed the picture. It was like a Madonna and Child picture. I started kind of losing it, because as a photographer, one is always aware: Where is this picture going? Who will see it? How will it be laid out by the art director? All these things are swimming around in your mind the very moment you’re pressing that button. Was it contrived? I have such guilt about all those images. I don’t live a comfortable life anymore because of the guilt.

You’re simply documenting what’s out there. You didn’t create these situations.

I didn’t go to these conflicts to do any harm to anybody. I went there innocently, with my eyes wide open. But then I carried that film very tenderly on the plane coming back, protecting it from all possible disasters: There are always people trying to spoil your day in photography, who try and stop you in the first place, and then people trying to confiscate your film in the second place. You can’t imagine the journeys back from those assignments. They were fraught with the pain and the danger of me losing that film or maybe someone processing that film badly. I wasn’t expecting reward. My true thoughts in all this would have been that the art director at the London Sunday Times sees the power and the value in these pictures and gives me lots of space to give me the voice.

Most people back home are so distanced from what you’ve experienced.

I went to my first war in 1964. It was the civil war in Cyprus. I was a novice and I saw my first dead body. At first I couldn’t look at the body. A British soldier had come up and said, “Ah, there’s a dead body up there,” as if it were a matter-of-fact kind of day. It was my first baptism of war. I saw the body and I looked at the feet. Then gradually my eyes went to the head that had been hit by a shotgun shell. Then the soldier said, “By the way, there are some more in that house.” He was talking in a way that sounded like he wasn’t talking about anything that was human. I knocked on the door of this house. There was no answer, so I let myself in and saw two bodies lying on the floor. The silence was the biggest surprise. Suddenly, the family of the dead people came, and I thought they would assault me—“What’s this man doing in our house?” They didn’t, to my astonishment. I learned so much that day. I set a rule for myself: You know, you’re like a man on a tightrope. You’re very high, one mistake and you’re dead. 

So I’ve exercised a kind of politeness, respectfulness. One day I got attacked by a woman in Lebanon; her family had been wiped out by a bomb that had leveled this block of flats, and I made the mistake of raising my camera to my eye when she was screaming. She started beating the hell out of me. When it was all over, I went back to the hotel. I said to myself, Don, you made a mistake there. You were too quick. You should have thought this through a bit more. Then a man came into the hotel and said, “You know that woman…?” I interrupted, “Please don’t talk to me about her.” He said, “No, I must tell you. She’s just been blown away by another car bomb.” She was a Lebanese woman. Death was a common event on an hourly basis. People would be killed by a sniper hundreds of yards away, at night, while they were in their homes watching television. People would be killed in their bathtub. You know the question mark that hangs over me: What does all this have to do with photography?

So this wasn’t the career or the life you envisioned.

When I was a young man—I’m not a very bright human being—I didn’t go to school. I was going to use my cameras as a way of life. I wasn’t very educated. But I was in these wars and revolutions where you needed to have some sort of understanding and compassion. I used compassion as my guiding light. I became a compassionate person.

The photograph in Cyprus showing the two men on the floor—the man in the foreground, with his eyes open, almost seems to have a smile on his face.

How very accurate you are. Because there’s also no sign of blood at all on that man. He had only been married a few days before. He seemed to be just resting. He almost seems to be like a child in deep sleep. I’ve seen hundreds of dead people since that first day.

Do you become more numb to it?

I’ve never been numb, even in the beginning. If I had been numb, I don’t think my pictures would have had the compassion I tried to convey in my images. I’m not the kind who just charges in. I’ve seen other photographers and television crews behaving so badly in wars; they crash into people’s homes and talk about prime-time television and push and shove and punch each other. It’s really awful how some of them behave. I made a point in my life of almost trying to be invisible so that I don’t offend other people’s grief that’s tearing them to pieces.

Photographer Marc Riboud said the same thing about how he approached his coverage of the Vietnam War.

I knew Marc very well. He was very well educated, very sophisticated, and he came from a reasonably good family. I grew up with a very poor background as a boy among street boys who fought each other and became criminals. So Marc and I were totally different animals. In some respects, I slightly envied his kind of background. If I had been more educated, I might have been more affected by the tragedies I’d seen in my life and been more mentally harmed by it.

You probably have known many writers and photographers who have returned with PTSD. Once you’ve seen what you’ve seen, you can’t unsee it.

It’s a daily companion and a nightly companion. There’s no escape. You’ve opened that door and you’ve seen that darkness, and you will never erase it from your memory.

Are you finding the landscape photography you do therapeutic?

It’s been my shrink. I live in Somerset now, and I journey to Hadrian’s Wall deliberately in the winters so it’s harsh and cold and uncomfortable. But when I get there, I’m alone and isolated. It’s not a day of tourism. The day belongs to me. Photography isn’t just about pressing a button, it’s about having an experience. With the landscape. With people. With events. With time.

Have you moved to digital?

I have, actually—for all my sins, I may add. I’ve always been a very staunch black-and-white man. I process my own film. I make my own prints. I have 10,000 prints in this house which I’ve made. I did open a cabinet the other day and saw that a mouse had gotten in there and been chewing away and having dinner on one of my prints. So I don’t have archival museum conditions. I live in this English country house. I believe in fate. I don’t mind the odd mouse having dinner on me. It’s just life, isn’t it, really?

You could have ended up as a gang member as easily as a photographer?

One hundred percent right. I grew up with a gang of boys who one night had a clash with another gang of boys who came to really sort them out. And the policeman who tried to stop this gang was killed by one of the other gang members. This happened at the end of the street where I lived in north London. So you could say my life was baptized by violence from the word go. By the way, I did my national service in the Air Force photographic section, but I failed to pass the trade test to become a photographer.

So what did you do in that section?

I was in a laboratory, printing aerial photographs. So I came out of the Air Force with a camera, a Rolleicord I bought while stationed in Kenya. I eventually started looking at my surroundings—just prior to the gang killing—and would take pictures of the local people. I wish I would have done so much more of it. That way of life doesn’t exist anymore. When you have photographs that are 65 years old, it’s like wine; it enriches in value. It enriches the atmospherics of that time and makes them very historical.

The photos you did of the gang members were the gateway to your career and, literally and figuratively, helped you break out of that area.

Absolutely. The picture of the gang standing in a derelict building, which was also at the end of the road where I lived, was the first picture used in 1958 at the Observer newspaper, all associated with the killing of the policeman. The very next morning after publication, I was offered every job in England that had to do with photography, theater, and television. People thought I was already a celebrated photographer. I was Mr. Nobody, who didn’t know anything about photojournalism.

Except, by then, you had already had the training in the Air Force.

No, I have to arrest you there. All I did was bulk processing of aerial reconnaissance film in the Air Force, photographs which I didn’t take.

At least you learned about processing.

Yes, but not as much as I know now, of course. I failed the trade test because I couldn’t read properly. It would have allowed me to move on to the next step and be acclaimed as an RAF photographer. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter, because when I eventually got published, I started looking around for better photographic magazines and I taught myself everything I know about photography. I still consider myself a student in photography. I’m learning every day of my life even though I’m 88 years of age.

And now you’re shooting digital.

I am. Now that outlets for photojournalism are dying here in England and America, I feel the loss of the great days of photojournalism—the amazing photographers I’ve met in my life like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Cornell Capa, Eugene Smith, the extraordinary old Life magazine photographers I worked with. I met Eisie [Alfred Eisenstaedt—one of the weekly Life’s original photographers, hired in 1936] once in Martha’s Vineyard. He had an exhibition and they had him propped up by the door. But I didn’t know him personally. I have many books in my house; they’ve been my university in my photographic life. My favorite photographer is [Czech-born] Josef Sudek. He’s a bit like Eisie. In the Austro-Hungarian army, he lost his right arm because he was an artilleryman and a shell backfired, and eventually they had to take his arm from the shoulder blade itself. But this man did the most beautiful pictures you’ve ever seen. Of course, it’s not the physical body that gives you the mind of the photographer; it’s the emotion—combined with the eyes.

Photographer Albert Watson can only see through one eye, hence the name of one of his books, Cyclops. His work is magnificent.

There’s only one fashion photographer who I was in awe of. And that was Helmut Newton, whom I knew personally, and I loved him. You keep seeing pictures by him that you’ve never seen before. That’s all gone now. I use digital, but I’m wary of it because it never gives you the proper rendering in color. Its color is slightly ghastly. If anything, color works in a very subdued light, otherwise it becomes too cheesy and too chocolate box-y.

You see things more starkly, having been in so many conflict zones.

When I go to bed at night, it all comes back clearly to me. One day in El Salvador, we were in a battle where the government troops were taken by surprise by the rebels. I was with a very nice American photographer, John Hoagland, and we went in there and he spoke Spanish. I said, “We can’t stay, they’re going to counterattack with government soldiers. Let’s take the wounded out of here.” He said, “What a good idea.” He had a 4x4, so we filled up the truck with the bloodied, wounded people. As we were leaving, a man said, “There’s one more man.” I said, “John, I’ll go and get him.” So I went down this alleyway and went into this very poor house and I heard this terrible noise, and they rolled this man over and he had no face from the nose down. Everything was gone. We pitched him up in a chair and ran him to the road for the truck. I got hold of him and made him stand and walk, and I had my arms around him. We got him in the truck next to John, who drove, and we went to the hospital as quick as we could. A week later, I was in another battle and I fell from the roof backwards and broke everything—my arm, my ribs. And I said to the doctor, “How’s that man?” He asked, “What man?” “The man I brought in with half his face missing.” He said, “Oh, he’s fine.” And I thought, How can you say that, a young man with no face? How could he be fine? The crux of my story is: When I go to bed at night and I bring all this back, I think, That could have been my face. I don’t think I could have gone on living. I would have ended my life somehow. So I’ve been lucky.

Hoagland was later killed in El Salvador. Years before, you were seriously wounded in Cambodia.

I don’t consider the wounds I’ve had even worth talking about. Because getting shells in your legs can be dealt with, but you can’t build a new face on a young man. The first week I was in Cambodia, I got hit in my legs with a shell and my ear was blown. My camera took a bullet that first week. I had this Nikon F, and it hit the lens and worked its way up. The camera is in my exhibition in Rome. I ended up in hospital in Cambodia for nine days. These are scratches, really, compared with the horrible things you see in war. I also had cerebral malaria. You expect to be a casualty now and again when you think about what you’re involved in. You can’t go there with any form of immunity.

How did you put yourself back in the line of fire after being wounded or having close calls?

I said to myself, You could do better next time. Robert Capa said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In a way, I can hear his words ringing in my mind. I never used long lenses. I almost always used a 28mm. I also had one 35mm, almost a portrait lens. I wanted to be right next to the guys in the action. I didn’t want to be miles away. I wanted to be right in front. Sometimes in front of them. My whole thing was 30 rolls of Tri-X, three cameras, one in reserve. Two Lunasix light meters, one in reserve. I kept my stuff light. My biggest problem in those days was finding things to eat. I was always hungry. I would wake up in the morning, and the first thing I would do was go scouting around for some food so that I could keep my energy level up. My energy was great when I was a young man. Now I’m afraid of slipping in the bathtub or falling down the stairs as people of my age do.

Are you surprised by what’s going on in Israel and Gaza now?

Let me just explain that I’ve been in three Israeli wars. I was one of the only ones there when the Israelis captured Jerusalem. All the other journalists went to the Sinai in 1967. I went to Jerusalem through the Lions’ Gate when they captured the city. I was in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, on the Golan Heights. The journalist I was with from The Sunday Times was killed. We were working together. His name was Nicholas Tomalin. Then I was in Lebanon in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Beirut. So I’ve covered three Israeli wars. I’ve spent a lot of time with the Palestinians. With Yasser Arafat and people like that. So I’m very familiar with that situation in the Middle East. I’ve been going there for 50 years.

Will there ever be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

The only way it can get resolved is if they have a two-state solution. Otherwise, this will go on forever. [Israeli leader Benjamin] Netanyahu is a disaster because he’s tried to be obstructive about the two-state solution. He doesn’t believe in it, you see.

If you had it to do over, would you do anything differently?

Yes. In the last 20 years, I’ve had a great passion for Roman archaeological sites, and I’ve just published Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor. I’m very proud of it, really. Anything to do about culture outside of war is a plus for me. Mind you, the Romans were incredibly violent. I was allowed to go into The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last year and photograph the Roman room, and I was never more happy. I got the most beautiful pictures photographing the statues. I think I would spend my life doing that, all over: archaeological and Roman history.

You would have become an archaeologist?

Not at all. I would have become very capable at photographing Roman archaeological history. Not a scholar, just a photographer.

I don’t know if you could have made a living out of that.

You’re quite right. I would have been on the edge of poverty, but I would also have been in the center of great happiness and joy. But, mind you, when I photograph the great Roman temples and things like that, I always give thought to the fact that they were only created by slavery in the first place. They used their enemies as slaves to build their temples. And many of them would have died in the quarries to get the stone in the first place. Everything I do is slightly overshadowed. When I look at a great Roman building, I think, How beautiful! But hang on a minute, this could only have been put here by the slaves and the deaths of others. So sometimes these joys are stolen away from you moments after you’ve discovered them.

In one way, we can look at it as “this is humanity; this is who we are as a species.”

It’s taken me all my life to realize how futile violence is, in any shape or form. That’s why photography was meant to give me another life, take me away from the ignorance and the bigotry of the people I grew up with. I’ve been so grateful. I didn’t choose photography, I felt it chose me. I suppose I could speak for you as well. Photography may have found you.

Your wife, Catherine Fairweather McCullin, has been invaluable in helping with your work and legacy. And you were married to a photographer for a time, Marilyn Bridges. People think it’s romantic to marry a photographer.

Big mistake. Because they’re never there. I’ve had four wives. They didn’t know that we married photography. What I’ve done in my life, I’ve been very privileged to increase my education, for want of a better word. I’ve worked with amazing people—distinguished writers, travelers, journalists. They became my tutors. So I learnt from them. I listened. I was very privileged to travel with them. I traveled with John le Carré ​​once. We went to the Middle East together; he wanted to film one of his books, The Little Drummer Girl. So I went with him and a man named George Roy Hill, who had directed The Sting. So the three of us went to Beirut to find locations. But it was impossible to film there. The place was always a powder keg. You couldn’t film there. They eventually made the film elsewhere. Traveling with a man of le Carre’s distinction, you listen to those people and you learn. They guide you if you have the patience to listen. There were lots of people like him I traveled with who weren’t photographers. They were men who wrote great books. How lucky I was to travel with those people. I learned the beauty of the written word and the minds of others. The philosophy was changing in my life. I started out as this snotty-nosed kid with no brains. I couldn’t read properly, never read a book in my life. There were no books in my house. And then suddenly I’m traveling with great writers and photographers. You couldn’t help having some of it rubbing off on you.

You have a minor case of dyslexia—that’s why you didn’t read?

Not minor, major. So I tried to overcome it. I read all the time now. My wife encourages me to read. Since we’ve been married, I read and read and read. The tragedy is, I forget everything I’ve read. But in my brain, I have tens of thousands of images. When you talk about [Vietnamese American photographer] Nick Ut, his picture of the young girl scarred by napalm is in my mind. Eddie Adams was another friend of mine. I think of his picture of the police chief shooting the Vietcong prisoner. All these images are tucked away in my head, and I can pull them out anytime I choose.

You have a visual library in your head.

And I have a huge library of photography books. I’m not short of information. I don’t use a computer, I don’t use a mobile phone. My wife, Catherine, sets everything up. I’m a hermit in terms of modern IT. I keep away from it. And with the digital cameras, Canons, I take the pictures in automatic. I don’t know how to use all the information. But the gift of God, my eyes, have given me this life. I can see and premeditate very swiftly. The photographers of Magnum, and the French photo agencies in the early 1960s, provided the inspiring sort of energy that made us all want to go to these wars. Those French photographers went wild. They were out of control. They made great photojournalists. I was in Magnum for one year, as a probationary, and they offered me the full membership after that year, but I said, “No, thank you. I don’t think I’m suitable.” I wanted to be on my own. I didn’t want to be part of a gang. I met Eugene Smith—he was always one of my heroes. But my greatest hero was Alfred Stieglitz. He was my greatest mentor. I never met him, but I felt as if I did know him. Everything I learned about him came from books. He was the man I felt I wanted to be. And Edward Steichen. He was head of the newly formed Naval [Aviation] Photographic [Unit]. I met him one day. I was with photographer Bruce Davidson, and we were at a big Magnum thing in New York. Steichen pushed me aside and he said, “I’m tired, and now black-and-white photography is finished. It’s going to be color, and good night to you, sir.” He was wrong. Black-and-white went on for quite a few more years. He was a great man, really.

How about photographer David Douglas Duncan, who covered World War II, Korea, and Vietnam?

I knew David Douglas Duncan. He gave me his book This Is War!, about Korea. I used to go to France and see him quite a bit. We understood each other’s minds. David said he was fed up because he was always going to New York for other people’s funerals. It’s the same with me now. People will ring up and say, “Oh, my husband has died. Would you come to London for the funeral?” I say, “No, I can’t. I’m too old.” I would be on a train every day going to funerals. I cannot bear any more funerals. I want to stay here in this house and look at the countryside. It’s very beautiful where I live.

Time passes, but beauty remains.

My time is up, really. I was in my darkroom last week. I made 20 beautiful exhibition prints and it nearly killed me. You have to stand there, watching them, washing the prints for hours.

Why don’t you get a darkroom assistant from a school? It would be a thrill for them.

It would be a thrill for them and a misery for me. I don’t like anybody near me when I’m working. I’ve got to be alone, even when I’m doing my landscapes. All the best work in my life I’ve been alone, without other people near me. That’s the way it has to be.

You tend to print on the dark side.

You’re a great observer. I print dark because there is darkness in me. I’m a dark person. I try not to be down. When you see my prints, you’re not going to forget them and you’re not going to walk past them. Because they’re dark. I don’t want people to walk past my pictures without noticing them. That punching black hits you. You’re going to look at it and you’re going to remember it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Special thanks to Peter Fetterman, Catherine Fairweather McCullin, Robert Pledge, Jeffrey Smith of Contact Press Images, GOST Books, and the Palazzo Esposizioni Roma for their assistance.