Don McCullin Quotes

Photography isn't about seeing, it's about feeling. If I don't have some kind of feeling for what I'm shooting, how can I expect the person who looks at it to feel anything?

I don't want to die for a few pictures. I want to live for every sunrise I can clap my eyes on; I want to see my family get older; I want to see the world try and get a bit more peaceful and understanding, which unfortunately I don't think I'll ever see.

Photography has been very, very generous to me, but at the same time has damaged me.

Photography is the truth if it's being handled by a truthful person.

I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life.

Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It's as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.

I treat my life as though I am on a tightrope.

America has never taken me to its heart. I've always been an outsider.

Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.

I have more of a relationship with the subject than I do with my camera equipment. To me, camera equipment is like a tin of shoe polish and a brush - I use that as a tool, but my basic camera is my emotion and my eyes. It's not anything to do with the wonderful cameras I use.

Photography's a case of keeping all the pores of the skin open, as well as the eyes. A lot of photographers today think that by putting on the uniform, the fishing vest, and all the Nikons, that that makes them a photographer. But it doesn't. It's not just seeing. It's feeling.

I am a professed atheist, until I find myself in serious circumstances. Then I quickly fall on my knees, in my mind if not literally, and I say : 'Please God, save me from this.'

The real truth of life is on the streets. Photograph the daily lives of people, and how they exist, and how they fight for space and time and pleasure.

I've always thought photography is not so much of an art form but a way of communicating and passing on information.

I have been manipulated, and I have in turn manipulated others, by recording their response to suffering and misery. So there is guilt in every direction: guilt because I don't practice religion, guilt because I was able to walk away, while this man was dying of starvation or being murdered by another man with a gun. And I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: I didn't kill that man on that photograph, I didn't starve that child. That's why I want to photograph landscapes and flowers. I am sentencing myself to peace.

I know where I'm coming from; I know what I bring and what I take. I take more than I bring; I bring hope, but I give nothing. That's not the role I'm proud of.

I want to be the toughest photographer in the world.

Most of the people I know, their marriages went down the drain, like mine - something I am not proud of.

In my photography, I always lean towards the underprivileged because that's where I came from. When I went to the wars, I attempted to go and stand by those who were being trodden on. By that, I mean people like the Palestinians. When I go to India, I see really the poorest people, and I tend to be drawn to them.

I've spent most of my life embracing violence in wars and revolutions. Even a famine is a form of violence. Because I photograph people in peril, people in pain, people being executed in front of me, I find it very difficult to get my head around the art narrative of photography.

I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.

Every street in London has a camera, and if you ever travel up the M4, it feels as if George Orwell should be your chauffeur.

I was dyslexic and uneducated and left school at 14. I grew up in Finsbury Park, which was a pretty bad place where you had to fight and be beaten. It was just a constant roundabout of violence.

I've fallen in love with the classical world of imagery, and what I'd like to do now over the last bit of my life is to photograph some nudes.