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The photographer Don McCullin talks to Jessamy Calkin about his life's work.
When Don McCullin shows me around his garden in a village in the heart of Somerset he is more the country squire than the world-famous war photographer. It is a lovely garden, well tended but not manicured, drenched in birdsong, and he takes great pride in his trees - an old oak, a beech, a sycamore, a cherry. McCullin has a beguiling voice and a curiously touching way of phrasing things: he marvels that his ancient apple tree is 'still offering fruit', and he is proud of the new gates he got from the reclamation centre to separate his land from the road ('the English are a thieving lot').
McCullin is 77, but looks more handsome, in a clapped-out sort of way, than he did when he was young. He had a stroke and a quadruple bypass two years ago, and his feet hurt now, and his hands. 'It's definitely arthritis,' he says. 'Fifty-five years in the darkroom, in icy wintry water.' He lives with his third wife, Catherine Fairweather (who works in London during the week), and their son, Max, 11, but for 16 of the 30 years he has lived here, he was alone and wifeless, spending most of his time in his darkroom. 'It's allowed me to turn my energy to my work,' he says.
McCullin is currently making beautiful prints for the 25th Visa pour l'Image at Perpignan, the primary festival for photojournalism in Europe, where he has been invited to exhibit. He is meticulous and perfectionist, a master of his craft: he clearly loves printing, and does all his own spotting (hand-retouching). 'Bringing these pictures back from the wars as I did in the past, I always wanted to give a bit more elbow to them, because I wanted the viewer not to miss it. The subject matter is bad enough, but I used to think, I can inject more into this picture,' he says.
You get a glimpse of his former life as he relates, in his measured voice, in this sylvan setting, some of the horror and cruelty he has seen: people skinned alive in Congo and murdered with sledgehammers in Uganda; old people shot...