Don McCullin | Guardian photography guide (original) (raw)

Many years ago, I used to walk the streets around Brick Lane in the East End of London, looking for homeless people. I was doing a story about derelicts – the human beings who are pushed aside and ignored by our society.

Unlike today, most of the people I encountered were not young. Many were middle-aged men whose lives had failed them, or who had failed themselves. Several of them had been chucked out of mental institutions.

I walked zigzags for hours in the cold each day, knowing that eventually, maybe around the next corner, there would be a confrontation. There was definitely good material out there. These people used to fight each other. They'd threaten me, too.

They'd be lying in the gutter and things like that, and I was determined to bring the whole story together. It was just a case of me having the patience, quickly thinking through the composition when I found something, and then shooting the picture.

You might say there was a question over my mental state as well. Was I behaving right? I certainly felt uncomfortable, but at the same time there was a sense of excitement that I might at any time encounter some amazing scene. There isn't that much difference between the photographer and the hunter.

Homeless Irishman, East End, London, 1969 Photograph: Don Mccullin/Contact Press Images

Among the pictures I got was one of a man lying by the embers of a fire in Spitalfields market (main image), as well as a portrait of him looking straight at me (left), covered in dust and dirt from the fire. You can see the truth in those photographs, I think. If you slept on the streets for a few weeks, I wouldn't need to manipulate a photograph of you to show it.

But seeing – really seeing – has nothing to do with photography. And it rewards you with pleasure. I love looking at the sky. I love looking at detail. I think anybody with an intelligent mind can look at something through their own eyes and assess its value. You can feast your eyes on a daily basis, although I suspect the average man on the street goes through life with narrowed vision, not seeing the whole scope of what's going on around him.

There's such an abundance of imagery at our fingertips these days that people are looking into screens all the time, but that isn't where the world is. In the house where I live, I can wake up in the morning, open the curtains and occasionally see deer on the lawn, because we live in totally open country. That moment is like a new birth. It brings so much energy and joy with it that I feel like I can accomplish anything that day. Photography is just about showing the truth of that. The most important thing – and if any photographer wants to disagree with me, they can go off into oblivion – is your emotional approach.

I never use flash, I don't believe in cropping, and there's no way I'm going to manipulate a street photograph other than to get the composition right. I've only ever staged one picture in my life, in 1968, when I found a dead North Vietnamese soldier whose possessions had been rifled through by some American marines during the Tet offensive. They walked away making derogatory remarks about this man, calling him a "gook" and so on.

A dead North Vietnamese soldier and his plundered belongings, Hue, 1968. Photograph: Don Mccullin/Contact Press Images

I decided this wasn't right, so I shovelled his possessions together – his pictures of his family, his pathetic little medical kit and his bag of bullets – and photographed them at the foot of his dead body (pictured left). I know it was staged, and I did it as a statement. I have to own up to that. I just thought it was important that this man's voice could somehow be heard.

Some people say that truthfulness is impossible in photography. But if you're in a battle in Vietnam, watching young men dying and trying to kill other men, and there's no truth in that, where is there truth? When you see Eddie Adams' picture of the police chief shooting a man in Saigon, there is absolutely no doubt in your mind that you are looking at the ultimate disgusting truth of what happened that day.

Would moving the camera five inches to the left make any difference? I'm not saying that composition is not important. Even photographing a man throwing a grenade, I would be sure to take a split second to compose the shot.

Henri Cartier-Bresson could see more clearly than others, and he always managed to get the moment that most people wouldn't have seen, and yet when you look at his pictures, they are always perfectly composed. He was like a kind of sniper. He made sure that the people in his photographs just walked in to the perfect place by the time he pressed the shutter. The photograph he took of some women on a hill in India looking at the sunset is the most biblical picture I've ever seen.

This is why I really believe photography is about making an emotional commitment to where you are and what you're doing. I try to cut out the technical side as much as possible. If you're in a refugee camp, the knapsack you carry on your back is the weight of moral obligation, and the fear of failing.

People sometimes ask me: "Do you hide behind the camera?" What a ridiculous thing to say! "Do you ever hide from your own emotions?" That's the question they should be asking.

Sometimes, when you think you might be about to take a great picture, the brain starts scrambling your eyes. But if you're doing a slow, hand-held exposure, for example, you must be still and control your breathing in spite of all the excitement. Even now, when I stand on the edge of a field here in Somerset to take a landscape picture, it's not about getting the photograph, it's about being there. Don't waste time. Look at what's in front of you.