Don McCullin: Looking for England

Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down
Armageddon, come Armageddon!

(Morrissey, 'Everyday is Like Sunday')

 
I'm on fire
with desire-
I could handle half the tenors in a male voice choir.
Let's do it, let's do it tonight!

(Victoria Wood, 'Let's do it')

This town (town) is coming like a ghost town

All the clubs have been closed down

(The Specials, 'Ghost Town')

Now then Mardy Bum
I see your frown
And it's like looking down the barrel of a gun
And it goes off

(Arctic Monkeys, 'Mardy Bum')

England. Oh, England.

For some, England is a land of hope and glory, of special ones adorned along the balcony, crowds festooned below, flag in hand, celebrating their condescension. This version of England does not sing to me. The earlier lyrics do. England is a seaside in ruins, a bedroom farce directed by Victoria Wood, a ‘ghost town’ parliament chooses to ignore, a domestic skirmish of wits. Having a royal family belies our true character: we’re neither prim nor proper, we’re grim and dirty, bawdy raconteurs, scrabbling around in the muck, hoping to lift a drink, score a shag before the bell calls us home.

I’ve always been interested in Englishness. I studied it in my Literature degree, appraising Austen, Waugh, Tolkien, Fleming and Kureishi. You see, writers write our thinking. Whether it be novelists, playwrights or screenwriters, how we see ourselves owes much to them. The past notion of England was exceptionally white: country estate, bonnets and tails, tea and china, suppressed hearts, furtive glances. Over time it's become more colourful with Eastenders, Zadie Smith and Stormzy. There is more to the flag of St George than white skin and red cheeks, there's black and Asians too.

The Pride we have in this is fine, the Prejudice that comes with it is not.

Perhaps my fascination comes from the fact that I’m not seen as typically English. I have a Sri Lankan dad, brown skin and a surname that does not fit onto forms. I am not John Smith from Tunbridge Wells. However, despite feeling a kinship with Sri Lanka, I’m too ignorant to be allied with it. I don’t know the history, religion or language. I’ve only once felt the soil under my feet, two years ago for two weeks. My blood is Sri Lankan, but my heart is English. It’s composed of Smiths lyrics, punch-lines from classic comedies, the listing in the Radio Times. England for me is home.

Don McCullin is a photojournalist that is searching for England. He began his career sixty years ago, a few yards from his home in Islington. There, he took a picture that would change his life. Taking a break from menace, a local gang took recess in a gutted home. Like an inlay cover, McCullin positioned them and clicked them into posterity. The resulting photograph attracted the attention of The Observer and secured him a job travelling the length and breadth of the country, chronicling the land and its people. From there, he would go on to work in war zones from Vietnam to Lebanon, seeing atrocities that shocked him, but were all too common for locals. Today, his work is the subject of a retrospective in Tate Britain, and as part of the revival the BBC have asked him to re-trace the steps that led him to worldwide acclaim.

Guvnors in their Sunday Suits by Don McCullin

For McCullin to shoot the world, he first had to learn how to fire at cans. His back garden was the field of England: London’s East End, it’s gangs, homeless and racists; the industrial north with its slag heaps and billowing smoke; the seaside and its faded glamour. His black and white photographs were a stark reminder that the excitement and exuberance of the technicolour 60's had not reached everyone. With his apprenticeship served, McCullin went from kitchen-sink drama to horror cinematographer, projecting terrible images of foreign devastation onto our newspapers.

Although his reputation is as a war photographer, he feels his photos of home are as impressive as his abroad. The documentary Looking for England starts with him at Glyndebourne at an Opera Festival with a load of hooray henry’s. Coming from a working-class background, he feels a little out of place in this tuxedo world of loud opinions, but he reasons he must wear the uniform of the subject in order to blend in. The pictures he takes are rather wonderful and show that for all their rotten politics, toffs can be wonderfully eccentric. Serving as a juxtaposition, he then goes back to his childhood home, reminiscing on a hand to mouth existence made worse by his dad’s early death. McCullin said this terrible moment shaped his life and was the making of him. From there, he embeds himself in a countryside hunt, and later a city procession that has Muslim men beating their chests to commemorate Mohammed’s grandson. His odyssey ends in Scarborough where a man taps him on the shoulder announcing that he was McCullin’s subject fifty years earlier. He was the boy on the beach that kicked the ball that made the other child sprawl. It’s a beautiful moment and shows how empowering it can be for ordinary lives to be touched by art. Centuries ago only the landed rich would be framed into history, today any life can be made into an exhibition.

Pic. Don McCullin

The thing that gave me the biggest kick was seeing how much McCullin, aged eighty-three, loves his work. In a recent Guardian interview he described how ‘you’re totally captive to photography once it gets a grip of you,’ which is evident here. Despite his age, he’s up on walls, lampposts, crates trying to get the picture he craves. It’s apt that he takes a picture of a hunt because he’s like a hound. Once he gets a scent of something, he pursues it, dodging, darting between people, demanding his craving be sated; when he draws in he knows, they know, their life is in his hands - only in exceptional circumstances will he walk away - typically, he captures them, heart and soul. And this is what a photographer must do. You can’t be too nice, otherwise your editor won’t pay you. At the same time you have to know when the cost is too high, where no price paid will cover the guilt you’ll feel taking it.

Seeing McCullin reminded me of my dad. My dad has loved photography for years and now in his retirement is doing it more and more. Typically, my dad is mild-mannered, even-tempered, a picture of equanimity, but when he has a camera in hand he’ll charm anyone into giving him a photo. The vegetarian becomes a blood-hound, tracking human life, engorging them onto film. It’s given him a spring in his step and a summer to the soul – because importantly, you have to empathise and understand your subject to truly take them. I also love seeing the satisfaction a good photograph gives him. It’s that combination of technical smarts (framing, lighting, distance) and visceral pleasure- gut reaction- that make him feel really good about it. And when he e-mails the people of his photos, they feel their life has been validated, made worthy. For photography isn’t introspection, it’s going out into the world and showing a curiosity in a life that isn’t your own. It’s the understanding that you’re not the centre of the universe and making others, for a moment, the centre of it instead. Isn't that rather wonderful?

'Spitalfields Market,' by my dad.

Don McCullin’s Looking For England is on iPlayer. His exhibition is on at the Tate Britain until 6^th May.

My dad can be seen at Cassiobury Park taking pictures of birds on Thursdays.