42 Quotes by Don McCullin

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.

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

I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.

I want to be the toughest photographer in the world.

There’s always a threat surrounding the things you love.

You cannot walk on the water of hunger, misery, and death. You have to wade through to record them.

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 feel shabby – because I’ve made a name, quite a good name, out of photography. And I still find myself asking the same questions: Who am I? What am I supposed to be? What have I done?

I grew up as a boy with aggression.