A documentary and landscape photographer, Josef Koudelka first came to international prominence as the anonymous Czech photographer who chronicled the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The images he produced were eventually smuggled out of Prague and published in the Sunday Times.

Thematically, his work reveals humanity from the depths of chaos, portraying ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances and conflicts. Throughout his lengthy career he has established himself as the foremost chronicler of the changing landscape of Europe.

In this article, we’ll be sharing 25 of the best Josef Koudelka quotes. If you find the quotes helpful then we would be grateful if you could share the article with other photographers.

Josef Koudelka Quotes

I try to be a photographer. I cannot talk. I am not interested in talking. If I have anything to say, it may be found in my images.

I would like to see everything, look at everything, I want to be the view itself.

When I first started to take photographs in Czechoslovakia, I met this old gentleman, this old photographer, who told me a few practical things. One of the things he said was, “Josef, a photographer works on the subject, but the subject works on the photographer.

I don’t pretend to be an intellectual or a philosopher. I just look.

What matters most to me is to take photographs; to continue taking them and not to repeat myself. To go further, to go as far as I can.

The Work

I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily.

I never accepted any assignment, never photographed for money. I took photographs just for myself.

My work has no theme. I don’t care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in “the news.” But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life.

[My] photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers… They say: “We came to liberate you….” I say: “Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.” They say: No. We never… no shooting. No. No.” So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say: “Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.” And they have to believe me.

The changes taking place in this part of Europe are enormous and very rapid. One world is disappearing. I am trying to photograph what’s left. I have always been drawn to what is ending, what will soon no longer exist.

Personally, I have had the good fortune of always being able to do what I wanted, never working for others. Maybe it is a silly principle, but the idea that no one can buy me is important for me. I refuse assignments, even for projects that I have decided to do anyhow. It is somewhat the same with my books. When my first book, the one on the gypsies, was published, it was hard for me to accept the idea that I could no longer choose the people to whom I would show my photos, that any one could buy them.

It never seemed important to me that my photos be published. It’s important that I take them. There were periods where I didn’t have money, and I would imagine that someone would come to me and say: “Here is money, you can go do your photography, but you must not show it.” I would have accepted right away. On the other hand, if someone had come to me saying: “Here is money to do your photography, but after your death it must be destroyed,” I would have refused.

I don’t like captions. I prefer people to look at my pictures and invent their own stories.

By [photographing theater] the same way I photograph real life, I learned to see the world as theater. To photograph the theater of the world interests me more… With the gypsies, it was theater, too. The difference was that the play had not been written and there was no director – there were only actors… It was the theater of life… All I had to know was how to react.

Devastation is photogenic.

Koudelka on Technique

Sometimes I photograph without looking through the viewfinder. I have mastered that well enough, it is almost as if I were looking through it.

…photography was easier in the beginning. It’s like a dart game: at the beginning, you can toss them anywhere, they will always be well placed. Wherever you hit is the right place. But once you start building something, you realize that certain pieces are missing.

Listen, I have never had any hero in my life or in photography. I just travel, I look and everything influences me.

When I photograph, I do not think much. If you looked at my contacts you would ask yourself: “What is this guy doing?” But I keep working with my contacts and with my prints, I look at them all the time. I believe that the result of this work stays in me and at the moment of photographing it comes out, without my thinking of it.

Quotes for Better Photography

If I couldn’t shoot lots of photos, I would not be the photographer that I am. Still, the cost of film has often been a problem. At times, to save money, I had to work with remainders of movie-film, and even to buy film that was stolen. But when I have only three rolls of film left in my bag, I panic.

I have to shoot three cassettes of film a day, even when not ‘photographing’, in order to keep the eye in practice.

What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photographs.

I never stay in one country more than three months. Why? Because I was interested in seeing, and if I stay longer I become blind.

I am not interested in repetition. I don’t want to reach the point from where I wouldn’t know how to go further. It’s good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.

If I am dissatisfied, it’s simply because good photos are few and far between. A good photo is a miracle.

What’s your Favorite Josef Koudelka Quote?

Have a favorite Josef Koudelka quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To learn more about Koudelka’s photography, we recommend reading checking out his photographer profile on Magnum’s website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Robert Capa Quotes
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Don McCullin Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Quotes

The post 25 Josef Koudelka Quotes: The Importance of Looking appeared first on Photogpedia.

W Eugene Smith Quotes

Never have I found the limits of the photographic potential. Every horizon, upon being reached, reveals another beckoning in the distance. Always, I am on the threshold.

My pictures are complex and so am I.

I can’t stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

Each time I pressed the shutter release it was a shouted condemnation hurled with the hope that the picture might survive through the years, with the hope that they might echo through the minds of men in the future – causing them caution and remembrance and realization.

My camera, my intentions stopped no man from falling. Nor did they aid him after he had fallen. It could be said that photographs be damned for they bind no wounds. Yet, I reasoned, if my photographs could cause compassionate horror within the viewer, they might also prod the conscience of that viewer into taking action.

A photo is a small voice, at best, but sometimes – just sometimes – one photograph or a group of them can lure our senses into awareness. Much depends upon the viewer; in some, photographs can summon enough emotion to be a catalyst to thought.

Smith on Photojournalism

I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.

Photographic journalism, because of the tremendous audience reached by publications using it, has more influence on public thinking and opinion than any other branch of photography. For these reasons, it is important that the photographer-journalist has (beside the essential mastery of his tools) a strong sense of integrity and the intelligence to understand and present his subject matter accordingly.

Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

I try to take what voice I have and I give it to those who don’t have one at all.

Humanity is worth more than a picture of humanity that serves no purpose other than exploitation.

… to became neighbours and friends instead of journalists. This is the way to make your finest photographs.

I think the only thing wrong with the word “documentary” is that it can give some people the idea that you can make absolutely dull pictures of the ingredients of something instead of the heart of something.

To have his photographs live on in history, past their important but short lifespan in a publication, is the final desire of nearly every photographer-artist who works in journalism. He can reach this phase only by combining a profound penetration into the character of the subject with a perfection of composition and technique – a consolidation necessary for any photographic masterpiece.

I think that basically all of my photographs are failures… I’m not saying that as a self negation or anything like that, I just don’t judge it upon it upon how “good” it was, but rather upon how I’d fail upon what I was trying to say… I think this “Tomoko in her Bath” personally is the best photograph I ever made, it came to say what I was trying to say.

Quotes on Capturing the Truth

The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest -yes. Objective – no.

The first word I would remove from the folklore of journalism is the word objective.

With considerable soul searching, that to the utmost of my ability, I have let truth be the prejudice.

I am constantly torn between the attitude of the conscientious journalist who is a recorder and interpreter of the facts and of the creative artist who often is necessarily at poetic odds with the literal facts.

I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist—a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matter… and by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole.

The Photo Essay

I bear in mind that I have to have an opener and closer. Then I make a mental picture of how to fill in between these two. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’ll lie in bed and do a sketch of the pictures I already have. Then I’ll decide what pictures I need. In this way, I can see how the job is shaping up in the layout form.

In the building of a story, I being with my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices, What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair. You try to be honest and you try to be fair and maybe truth will come out.

[I would list the picture to take, and other things to do. It began with a beginning, but it was a much tighter and more difficult problem at the end. I’d say, ‘Well, she has this relationship to that person. I haven’t shown it. How can I take a photograph that will show that? What is this situation to other situations?’

Here it becomes really like a playwright who must know what went on before the curtain went up, and have some idea of what will happen when the curtain goes down. And along the way, as he blocks in his characters, he must find and examine those missing relationships that five the validity of interpretation to the play.]

I don’t think a picture for the sake of a picture is justified – only when you consider the purpose. For example, I photographed a woman giving birth, for a story on a midwife. There are at least two gaps of great pictures in my pictures.

I have personally always fought very hard against ever packaging a story so that all things seem to come to an end at the end of a story. I always want to leave it so that there is a tomorrow. I suggest what might happen tomorrow – at least to say all things are not resolved, that this is life, and it is continuing.

The Importance of Emotion

Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can’t get inside and know the subject.

I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.

The purpose of all art is to cause a deep and emotion, also one that is entertaining or pleasing. Out of the depth and entertainment comes value.

What uses having a great depth of field, if there is not an adequate depth of feeling?

W Eugene Smith Quotes on Technique

I didn’t write the rules – why should I follow them? Since I put a great deal of time and research to know what I am about? I ask and arrange if I feel it is legitimate. The honesty lies in my – the photographer’s – ability to understand.

[I crop ] for the benefit of the pictures. The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.

In music I still prefer the minor key, and in printing I like the light coming from the dark. I like pictures that surmount the darkness, and many of my photographs are that way. It is the way I see photographically. For practical reasons, I think it looks better in print too.

[on why he prints his own pictures] The same reason a great writer doesn’t turn his draft over to a secretary… I will retouch.

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work… The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.

W Eugene Smith Tips for Better Photography

When a good picture comes along, I shoot it. Later I may find a better variation of the same shot, so I shoot all over again.

Available light is any damn light that is available!

Since I am somewhat adequate as a photographer, I remain with it.

Halsmann: What if nobody sees [the work]? Besides a few friends?

Smith: Answer this and you will see how artists have acted throughout the bloody ages. The goal is the work itself.

An artist must be ruthlessly selfish.

Hardening of the categories causes art disease.

Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors.

What’s your Favorite W. Eugene Smith Quote?

Have a favorite W. Eugene Smith quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Like the article? Share it with other photographers.

To learn more about W. Eugene Smith’s photography, check out his photographer profile on Magnum’s website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Paul Strand Quotes
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Robert Frank Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 42 W. Eugene Smith Quotes on Mastering the Photo Essay appeared first on Photogpedia.

Lee Miller Quotes

I would rather take a photograph than be one.

There were lots of things, touching, poignant or queer I wanted to photograph…

I keep saying to everyone, ‘I didn’t waste a minute all my life’ – but I know myself, now, that if I had it over again, I’d be even more free with my ideas, with my body and my affection.

It seems to me that women have a bigger chance at success in photography than men… Women are quicker and more adaptable than men. And I think they have an intuition that helps them understand personalities more quickly than men.

I’m no good with my hands, though I am good with a screwdriver – taking a camera apart. But sewing on a button? I could scream.

The personality of the photographer, his approach, is really more important than his technical genius.

Quotes on the Work

[Being a great photojournalist is] a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.

Something crawled across my foot in the darkroom and I let out a yell and turned on the light. I never did find out that it was, a mouse or what. Then, I quickly realized that the film was totally exposed…Man [Ray] grabbed them, put them in hypo and looked at them later. He didn’t even bother to bawl me out, since I was so sunk. When he looked at them, the unexposed parts of the negative, which had been the black background, had been exposed by this sharp light that had been turned on and they had developed and came right up to the edge of the white, nude body. But the background and the image couldn’t heal together, so there was a line left which he called a “solarization.”

Miller on the rediscovery of solarization technique

No question that German civilians knew what went on. Railway into Dachau camp runs past villa, with trains of dead or semi-dead deportees. I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel it can publish these pictures.

I want the Utopian combination of security and freedom and emotionally, I need to be completely absorbed in some work or in a man I love.

Lee Miller and World War II

Women war photographers had to fight on two fronts: the bombs, and the men.

Paris had gone mad. The long, graceful, dignified avenues were crowded with flags and filled with screaming, cheering, pretty people. Girls, bicycles, kisses and wine, and around the corner sniping, a bursting grenade and a burning tank. The bullet holes in the windows were like jewels, the barbed wire in the boulevards a new decoration.

We heard bombers approaching over our shoulders… I had the clothes I was standing in, coupla-dozen rolls of film, and an eiderdown blanket roll. I was the only photographer for miles around and I now owned a private war.

I sheltered in a dugout, squatting under the ramparts. My heel ground into a dead, detached hand… I ran back the way I’d come, bruising my feet and crashing into unsteady piles of stones, slipping in blood… Christ, it was awful.

Nearly all the photographs I ever took have disappeared – lost in New York! Thrown away by the Germans in Paris, bombed and burned in the London blitz, and now I find Condé Nast has just casually scrapped everything I did for them, including war pictures.

I’d been carrying Hitler’s Munich address around in my pocket for years and finally I had a chance to use it. But my host wasn’t home. I took some pictures of the place and also I got a good night’s sleep in his bed. I even washed the dirt of Dachau off in his tub.

What’s your Favorite Lee Miller Quote?

Have a favorite Lee Miller quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. If you’ve found the article helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To see more of Miller’s incredible photography, head over to the Lee Miller Archive website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Man Ray Quotes
• Julia Margaret Cameron Quotes
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• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 16 Lee Miller Quotes: From Fashion Model to War Photographer appeared first on Photogpedia.

Sebastiao Salgado Quotes

The photographs are more a question than a reply.

I looked through a lens and ended up abandoning everything else.

I’m not an artist. An artist makes an object. Me, it’s not an object, I work in history, I’m a storyteller.

Your father and mother, when you were a child, they took precious photographs of you. They went to the shop on the corner to get them developed. That is a memory. That is photography.

The biggest danger for a photographer is if they start thinking they are important.

There comes a moment when it is no longer you who takes the photograph, but receives the way to do it quite naturally and fully.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it’s formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

Photography is full of symbolism, it’s a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

I’m not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

Quotes on Style and Technique

My way of photographing is my way of life. I photograph from my experience, my way of seeing things.

Of course, I won’t be abandoning photography, because it is my life.

Photography is not objective. It is deeply subjective – my photography is consistent ideologically and ethically with the person I am.

I work only in 35mm format. I have a small bag so I can carry all my films with me for one or two months. That means I am completely independent and free. Interview with Sebastiao Salgado, Ken Lassiter, 2004 [Before switching to digital]

I work with very fast film. I always close my diaphragm to give a huge depth of field. Volumes for me are very important. Reality, is full of depth of field.

You know where you’ll go, but you don’t know what you will bring back… Photography is one 250th of a second, there are a lot of variables. There must be light. There must be power. There must be personality if it’s a portrait. Interview with The Guardian, 2015

You photograph with all your ideology.

I don’t believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.

Photojournalism and Documentary Work

When I was just starting out, I met Cartier-Bresson. He wasn’t young in age but, in his mind, he was the youngest person I’d ever met. He told me it was necessary to trust my instincts, be inside my work, and set aside my ego. In the end, my photography turned out very different to his, but I believe we were coming from the same place.

It is a great honor for me to be compared to Henri Cartier-Bresson… But I believe there is a very big difference in the way we put ourselves inside the stories we photograph. He always strove for the decisive moment as being the most important. I always work for a group of pictures, to tell a story. If you ask which picture in a story I like most, it is impossible for me to tell you this. I don’t work for an individual picture. If I must select one individual picture for a client, it is very difficult for me.

I have been photographing the portrait of an end of an era, as machines and computers replace human workers. What we have in these pictures is an archeology.

As long as there’s journalism, there will be photojournalism. They’re two halves of a whole. And although they certainly won’t last forever, for the moment I don’t see either one of them coming to an end. Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, stated that photography, rather than film or television, is the collective memory of the world. As I see it, he’s right about this. Photography immortalize a moment, which then becomes a symbol, a reference. Photography is universal language; it doesn’t need translation. Its collective memory is a mirror in which our society continually observes itself.

If I were speaking to the students who want to go into documentary or human photography, I would tell them we need more people to do this kind of work. I’d encourage them.

Salgado on Humanatarian Photography

I don’t want anyone to appreciate the light or the palette of tones. I want my pictures to inform, to provoke discussion – and to raise money.

I try with my pictures to raise a question, to provoke a debate, so that we can discuss problems together and come up with solutions.

We can take a picture that communicates, one where we can see the problems and the people from around the world. We show the people of Bangladesh to others so they can understand them. I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.

We are one human race, and there must be understanding among all men. For those who look at the problems of today, my big hope is that they understand. That they understand that the population is quite big enough, that they must be informed that they must have economic development, that they must have social development, and must be integrated into all parts of the world.

What I want is the world to remember the problems and the people I photograph. What I want is to create a discussion about what is happening around the world and to provoke some debate with these pictures. Nothing more than this. I don’t want people to look at them and appreciate the light and the palate of tones. I want them to look inside and see what the pictures represent, and the kind of people I photograph.

Quotes on Photographing People

If you take a picture of a human that does not make him noble, there is no reason to take this picture. That is my way of seeing things.

You need to be accepted by reality.

I work alone. Humans are incredible, because when you come alone, they will receive you, they accept you, they protect you, they give you all things that you need, and they teach you all things you must know. When you come with two persons or three persons, you have a group in front of them. They don’t discuss with the new persons what is important to them…

There are moments that you suffer a lot, moments you won’t photograph. There are some people you like better than others. But you give, you receive, you cherish, you are there. When you are really there, you know when you see the picture later what you are seeing.

I tell a little bit of my life to them, and they tell a little of theirs to me. The picture itself is just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.

The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.

The Planet

So many times I’ve photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet – to see the innocence.

In the end, the only heritage we have is our planet, and I have decided to go to the most pristine places on the planet and photograph them in the most honest way I know, with my point of view, and of course it is in black and white, because it is the only thing I know how to do.

I discovered that close to half the planet is ‘pristine.’ We live in towns such as London, Paris or Sao Paulo and have the impression that all the pristine areas are gone, but they are not.

We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we’ve been living in cities, we’ve become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land.

I can be an artist a posteriori, not a priori. If my pictures tell the story, our story, human story, then in a hundred years, then they can be considered an art reference, but now they are not made as art. I’m a journalist. My life’s on the road, my studio is the planet.

Sebastiao Salgado Quotes on Projects

I very much like to work on long-term projects…There is time for the photographer and the people in front of the camera to understand each other. There is time to go to a place and understand what is happening there… When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

When I started Genesis I was 59 and I thought I was an old man. But now I am going to be 70 and I feel fine so I am ready to start again. Life is a bicycle: you must keep going forward and you pedal until you drop.

Most of the information we now get is through television and is mutilated. Photography offers the opportunity to spend much more time on a topic. It’s relatively cheaper medium, and can allow a photographer really to live in another place, show another reality, get closer to the truth.

When you work fast, what you put in your pictures is what your brought with you – your own ideas and concepts. When you spend more time on a project, you learn to understand your subjects. There comes a time when it is not you who is taking the pictures. Something special happens between the photographer and the people he is photographing. He realizes that they are giving the pictures to him.

You can sit in your house and be a great writer. But with photography the story is outside the door. You have to go and you have to go far.

The big privilege of photography is to go where you like; you are a free bird, you are alone in this trance. When you really get inside something, that is part of the trance. It is total joy.

What’s your Favorite Sebastiao Salgado Quote?

Have a favorite Sebastiao Salgado quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Like the article? We would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers.

To learn more about Salgado’s remarkable photography, check out the image archive on his Amazonas Images website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Visit the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

Related Quote Articles:

• Don McCullin Quotes
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• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 45 Sebastiao Salgado Quotes on Photojournalism, Projects and the Planet appeared first on Photogpedia.

Below, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite Robert Capa Quotes that are guaranteed to inspire, motivate and help you take your photography to the next level. Hopefully you’ll learn more about the legendary photographer and his remarkable photography as well.

Robert Capa Quotes

While pursuing my studies, my parents means gave out, and I decided to become a photographer, which was the nearest thing to journalism for anyone who found himself without a language.

Like the people you shoot and let them know it.

I had a name which was a little bit different from Bob Capa. The real name of mine was not too good [Andre Friedman]. I was just as foolish as I am now, but younger. I couldnt get any assignment. I needed a new name badlyAnd then I invented that Bob Capa was a famous American photographer who came over to Europe and did not want to bore French editors because they did not pay enough. So I just moved in with my little Leica, took some pictures and wrote Bob Capa on it which sold for double prices.

Listen, old goat, today doesn’t matter and tomorrow doesn’t matter. It’s the end of the game that counts and how many chips you’ve got in your pocket, if you’re still playing.

It’s not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.

If you call yourself an artist, you won’t get anything published. Call yourself a photojournalist, and then you can do whatever you want.

Watch out for labels. They are reassuring but somebody’s going to stick one on you that you’ll never get rid of – “the little surrealist photographer.” You’ll be lost – you’ll get precious and mannered. Take instead the label of “photojournalist” and keep the other thing for yourself, in your heart of hearts.

Rober Capa’s advice to Henri Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s

You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.

Writing the truth being so obviously difficult, I have in the interests of it allowed myself to go sometimes beyond and slightly this side of it. All events and persons in this book are accidental and have something to do with the truth.

If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.

Robert Capa: Cuadernos de guerra en Espana (1936-1939)

Capa on War

Robert Capa photographed countless battles and five wars, starting with the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and finishing with the French Indochina War in 1954, where he sadly lost his life, after stepping on a land mine. There are few photographers that have photographed War with greater bravery or more intense passion as Capa.

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.

The [concentration camps] were swarming with photographers and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. Now, for a short day, everyone will see what happened to those poor devils in those camps; tomorrow, very few will care what happens to them in the future.

War is like an aging actress: more and more dangerous and less and less photogenic.

Robert Capa, Slightly Out Of Focus, p.245

It’s not easy always to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the suffering around one. The last day some of the best ones die. But those alive fast forget.

In a war you must hate somebody or love somebody, you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on.

I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life.

Robert Capa Quotes – at the end of World War II

Omaha Beach Landing, D-Day

On 6^th June 1944, Capa waded ashore on the beaches of Normandy, with his two Contax cameras. Below are several quotes taken from Capa’s book Slightly Out of Focus which describe his experience that day.

The war correspondent has his stake, his life, in his own hands and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.

My beautiful France looked sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge waded in the water. Waist-deep, with rifles ready to shoot, with the invasion obstacles and the smoking beach in the background – this was good enough for the photographer. I paused for a moment on the gang plank to take my first real picture of the invasion.

It was still very early and very gray for good pictures, but the gray water and the gray sky made the men, dodging under the surrealistic designs of Hitler’s anti-invasion brain trust, very effective.

I crawled on my stomach over to my friend Larry, the Irish padre of the regiment, who could swear better than any amateur. He growled at me,”You damn half-Frenchy!If you didn’t like it here, why the hell did you come back?” Thus comforted by religion, I took out my second Contax camera and began to shoot without raising my head.

The next shell fell even closer. I didn’t dare to take my eyes off the finder of my Contax and frantically shot frame after frame. Half a minute later, my camera jammed – my roll was finished. I reached in my bag for a new roll, and my wet, shaking hands ruined the roll before I could insert it in my camera.

I paused for a moment… and then I had it bad. The empty camera trembled in my hands. It was a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face.

The water was cold and the beach still a hundred yards away. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle. A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover.

The rip tide hit my body and every wave slapped my face under my helmet. I held my cameras high over my head… and told myself, “I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.”

… put fresh film in both cameras. I got up on deck again in time to take one last picture of the smoke covered beach… An invasion barge came alongside… the transfer of the badly wounded in the heavy seas was a difficult business. I took no more pictures, I was busy lifting stretchers.

Capa took that invasion barge back to England and was the first photographer to return with pictures. After sending his film by courier for processing, he returned on the first available boat to Normandy.

I put my films in the press bag, changed my clothes, and returned to the beach head a few hours later on the first available boat. Seven days later, I learned that the pictures I had taken on “Easy Red” were the best of the invasion. But the excited darkroom assistant, while drying the negatives, had turned on too much heat and the emulsions had melted and rundown before the eyes of the London office. Out of one hundred and six pictures in all, only eight were salvaged. The captions under the heat-blurred pictures read that Capa’s hands were badly shaking.

When Capa’s photos were published around the world, they caused a sensation. Despite these images being blurry, they remain some of the most important photographs ever taken.

What he left behind is the story of his unique voyage and a visual testimony affirming his own faith in humankind’s capacity to endure and occasionally to overcome.

Cornell Capa, 1999 – Introduction to Slighly Out of Focus

What Camera Did Robert Capa Use

Capa started off with a Leica IIIa before switching to a Contax II camera with a Carl Zeiss Jena Sonnar 5cm f/2 lens. He also used a Rolleiflex. In addition to the Contax he also used a Nikon S with a 50mm for his later work. His prefered lens choice was a 50mm.

What’s your Favorite Robert Capa Quote?

Have a favorite Robert Capa quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To learn more about Robert Capa and to see more of her remarkable photography, check out his image archive on Magnum’s website.

Recommended book: Robert Capa: Slightly Out of Focus

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• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Don McCullin Quotes
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• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 28 Robert Capa Quotes On Photojournalism and War appeared first on Photogpedia.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Sir Don McCullin master profile article to learn more about his remarkable career, photographs, techniques and much more.

Don McCullin Quotes

I feel at the edge of my journey with photography now. I’m older, more knowledgeable, but I’m never satisfied, never arriving, always looking for something better to come. I’m a lost soul without photography.

The camera was a key to open up my life. It was like opening a huge window to the world. It gave me education, it gave me hope, it gave me travel, and in the end, after giving me all those things, it started taking things away from me. It took my mind away from me, it took things back from me. You don’t own those things in the beginning. You don’t own yourself in the beginning, you’re just dumped on this earth and you have to stand up and try to walk and try to get through it.

Digital cameras are extraordinary. I have a darkroom and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want… the whole thing can’t be trusted really.

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

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

The Life of a Photographer

Frankly, I didn’t really know anything about photography. I’d just been taking snaps. I had to learn very quickly. But after that famous picture of the gang was published in The Observer, I was offered every job in England – just because of that one picture.

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

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?

It’s the photographs that keep me going, physically and mentally. I just want to leave excellence behind; this is what controls me, and I like that, because it has brought me to this stage.

…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.

You can’t go around kidding yourself that your photographs in a few papers will change the world. They can’t and they haven’t. I dispair about the human race. The press only shows the bums, the killers and the arms dealers and people like that. Good news never sold a newspaper.

My life has always been about adventures. Being on edge all the time helps my photography.

I need a challenge. My greatest fear is sitting and staring out of a window without the passion to do anything anymore.

Art and Titles

I’m not an artist. I’ve been struggling against that word all my life. The American photographers all want to be called artists. I’m a photographer and I stand by it.

I am not an artist. Today, every photographer in America – if not the world – wants to be called an “artist”, which is bullshit. Why do you need a title? All you need to do is to take good pictures and offer them to people.

I have a strong creative desire but I’m not trying to be an artist. I don’t need titles. I hate the title, ‘artist’. I just describe myself as a photographer. I have a good nose for news. It’s about knowing your trade.

I think, the more of a student I am, the better it will be for my work because it means once you have too many accolades you don’t try harder. I would never allow myself to think that I don’t have to try harder. I like the idea of always learning, always trying to do better. The word “master” sits uneasy on my terms.

Don McCullin’s Quotes for Better Photography

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 look for drama – drama is the key factor in all my work.

I realized that you could shoot photographs until the cows came home but they have nothing to do with real humanity, real memories, real feelings.

There is no doubt that my photographs have a very strong religious overtone, they are like twentieth century icons. When human beings are suffering, they tend to look up, as if hoping for salvation. And that’s when I press the button.

A sense of timing is the most important part of the life of a professional photographer. I have an uncanny way of being at the right place at the right time. And if the time is not right, I can be patient, stay in that place for hours, willing things to come.

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.

Photography will screw you every time it gets a chance to screw you, every time you put a roll into the camera… Sometimes I come back and find that the film has been damaged or that the camera’s back has been leaking. I don’t get angry, I don’t smash the camera, I just laugh and think: “It didn’t respect me, I wasn’t meant to have it.”

I think I am lucky if I can produce one good picture every year.

We don’t live in a black and white world, but once you see a black and white photograph, it haunts you. I have done a few pictures of wars in colour, but they don’t work – they feel too cosy – while black and white photographs will penetrate your memory.

Photography isn’t about just pushing that button. It’s about the experience of being there.

Don McCullin Quotes on Photojournalism

I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of other people. I knew I was capable of another voice.

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.

Although I take my work seriousily I cannot take myself seriously. When you think of it, everything has happened by accident. I have always believed that I don’t own my photography, rather that it owns me. It gave me a life, an extraordinary life which could never be repeated. I feel as if the gift of seeing what is really going on in the world is mine only so long as I put it to proper use. There is nothing to be claimed and nothing to regret, except that we go on treating our fellow human beings so badly.

I spent six weeks photographing homeless people. I think it’s the best thing I ever photographed. I went every day, parked my car up about a mile away, wore really old clothes, and carried a Nikon F under my overcoat. Then I would gradually bring the camera out. They’d all start shouting and jumping, “What the fuck are you doing?!” I liked both the danger and the challenge of it; they were quite violent people, but no one ever tried it on with me.

It’s not important that I record every tragedy that goes on in the world. But I decided to try a couple of shots. And I did something despicable. I wound the car window down and took the photographs from inside. Then I hated myself for not having the decency and courage to at least get out and do something…

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

Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.

I met an Englishwoman in Africa. She said she became a doctor because she saw one of my pictures. That’s all I want – just one doctor in Africa.

Our once great newspapers, which told us what went on in the world even when we couldn’t affect it, have become instruments of a promotional culture, little more than catalogues advising us what to consume. This is not a great age in which to be a photojournalist.

War and Conflict Photographer

I’m like an old junkie, in a way. You don’t stick syringes in your arm – you go straight for the most important part of your body, the brain. You are destroying it the moment you go to your first war.

I don’t believe you can see what’s beyond the edge unless you put your head over it; I’ve many times been right up to the precipice, not even a foot or an inch away. That’s the only place to be if you’re going to see and show what suffering really means… I’ve spent fourteen years getting on and off aeroplanes and photographing other people’s conflicts. I will never get on another aeroplane and go photograph another country’s war.

Soldiers firing rifles in war make ordinary pictures because without the action, the smell and the noise, you have no truth…

You can only demand respect from the energies around us if you practice respect yourself.

It is the photographer’s job to show some of [the horror of war], to say: this is what it’s like on the ground, this is what war does to you.

I have always said that when I go to war I try not to miss a thing. I shot the things that other photographers walked by.

I had a great respect for film and knew you mustn’t spoil or abuse it. I always used to go to Vietnam with thirty rolls of Tri-X film – nothing more, nothing less.

Somebody may have been killed by the wayside and his body is rotting away and nobody cares that it was a human being and it was a person – a living person. I care, and I am going to photograph it- as horrible as it looks, I’m going to photograph it.

I used to concentrate on the battle, on the soldiers in the front, but of course, that was never the true story. The true story for me later developed into the suffering of civilians.

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.

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.

A lot of people write to me, “I want to be a war photographer,” and it sickens me in a way. The desire to view death and suffering as a spectacle or adventurous career opportunity is perverse, especially when photographers only train their lenses on the problems of others. O.K., if you want to be a war photographer you don’t have to get in a plane and go to somebody else’s country. There’s a lot of poverty and misery and suffering in your own. I’ve been there.

Even in battle photography I go over on my back and read the exposure. What’s the point in getting killed if you’ve got the wrong exposure.

Don McCullin Quote from Interview with British Journal of Photography, March 2010

McCullin on Landscape Photography

People say “I love your landscapes”, but people shouldn’t love any war picture I’ve taken. When they say “love” they don’t mean it like that – they mean they were moved by it.

Landscapes freed me from the emotional garbage that I was carrying. I could go out into the landscape and have no reason to have any moral thoughts. But in the end, while taking these photographs, I suddenly realised that, there, everything I was looking at had a political dimension too: dairy farms closing, more land being taken up for housing… So even my landscapes are political, and not just in Britain. My landscapes have also recently been incorporating the destruction of Palmyra and similar places, which are totally politicised.

Related: Nature and Landscape Photography Quotes

I like photographing the English landscape in the winter, because it’s naked and it’s cold and it’s lonely, and I feel lonely doing it – and yes, I feel as happy as anything. There’s no politics, there’s no one saying: “get off my land!” No one’s pointing a gun at me. It’s almost as if I’m drinking from the flower, as if I’m drinking the pure nectar of freedom.

The great thing about landscape is that you owe nothing to fear. It’s all yours, no one can say you’re doing the wrong thing morally, there’s not a human being that can come up and say, “Why are you taking my picture?”

McCullin on Printing and the Darkroom

The darkroom can be cruel. You have to talk your way through your printing, alone, sometimes you turn the radio on and listen to trash music. When I finish, I wash everything meticulously, I dust everything, it’s like paying a homage to the spiritual power that could destroy me. And I won’t let it. Something else will destroy me – but it won’t be the darkroom, it won’t be photography. I am very strong, nearly ninety nine percent of me is strong and fortified all around. But I am sure there is a crack, somewhere behind me, in my make-up, where the damage will get in and destroy 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 live in this house with 60,000 negatives in these filing cabinets and several thousand prints, and they are all based on quite nasty subject matter. I’ve felt that when I’m asleep upstairs at night these ghosts get out of the filing cabinets and they contaminate the house.

When I look at the work of Alfred Stieglitz, I see so many tones. I’ve printed so many pictures, and worked in the darkroom for so long, I know my tones. The darkroom is an amazing, wonderful, and cunning place – it’s a place of mind-searching. By dodging and burning, I engage in the landscape work; there’s definitely some cunning goings-on in that darkroom.

People have always said that the darkroom is my womb, and I suppose that’s true. I like the consistency of the dark. It keeps me safe. I know that when I’m out taking photographs, I’m already thinking about being home and printing my images. But I’ve never betrayed what I set out to do. I just keep doing what I’m doing.

Perfection – you’re striving towards the perfect print. In the darkroom, you can almost hear the applause, the accolade of this perfect print. If I know that I’ll be printing the next day, I go to bed at night worrying, and sometimes I actually scan the negative in my imagination whilst I’m lying in bed. I know all of my negatives – I know where they succeed, and where there’s trouble. It’s just terrible the way that photography is blackmailing me all the time. I’ve been blackmailed for the last sixty years of my life by photography, and it’s been the greatest love affair; it’s fantastic really.

What’s your Favorite Don McCullin Quote?

Have a favorite quote from the list? Do you know any other Sir Don McCullin quotes that would make a great addition to the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To learn more about Don McCullin’s photography and legendary career, we recommend reading our Don McCullin master profile article. To see more Sir Don’s work, check out the image archive on his official website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Steve McCurry Quotes
• Bill Brandt Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 58 Don McCullin Quotes on Photography and Life appeared first on Photogpedia.

The multi-award-winning photographer has taken some of the most recognizable images in the history of photography, including his iconic 1984 image Afghan Girl, arguably the most famous portrait of the 20th Century.

His photos have been featured in every major magazine in the world and he has been a member of co-operative photo agency Magnum since 1986.

McCurry began his career as a press photographer in Pennsylvania before traveling to India to work as a freelance photographer.

His coverage of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which he slipped across the border from Pakistan to photograph, won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

Since then, he has gone on to take many iconic images that tell stories of people, places, and cultures around the world.

You could call him a photojournalist, documentary photographer, or even a portrait photographer, but McCurry shoots with the simple objective of capturing images that will stay with the viewer for a very long time.

When you look at a Steve McCurry photograph you simply don’t just look at it, instead, you are drawn into it: there’s a sense of mystery and timelessness about his photos that make them unique.

[He] brings you into the photograph… because of the shadow and lack of light perhaps, and also because of the color palette. And once you are in the picture you realize you are caught.

John Echaves, National Geographic

In this article, we’ll look at Steve McCurry’s background, photography style, and share his tips and advice for better photography.

Related: 57 Steve McCurry Quotes to Advance your Photography

As always, if you enjoy the article or find it helpful then we would be grateful if you could share with other photographers on social media, forums, or even your website.

Steve McCurry Biography

Name: Steve McCurry
Nationality: American
Genre: Photojournalism/Documentary, War, Portrait, Travel
Born: April 23, 1950 (Philadelphia, USA)

Early Career

Steve McCurry began his photography journey whilst at Penn State University, where he studied cinematography and film. He started out wanting to be a filmmaker, but after working for the college newspaper, he developed a passion for still photography.

After graduating, McCurry looked for a job in the film industry but ended up getting a job at a local newspaper as a photographer, where he stayed for three years.

When I left I was torn between stills and movie making and could have gone either way. What decided it was that I couldn’t get a job in the film industry, but did manage to get one on a newspaper. I’ve never regretted this decision. 

Steve McCurry

In 1978, he left his job and set off for India for a short self-funded assignment, carrying just a small bag of clothes, another bag full of film, and 2 film cameras.

I researched story ideas before I left and I hit the ground running. I was fascinated with the colour, vibrancy, culture, people, geography and the monsoons in India.

Steve McCurry

Conflict Photography

After eighteen months on the road, he found himself in Pakistan, where he came across Afghan refugees.

While I was up in the north of Pakistan, I met some Afghan refugees who invited me to go into their country and see what was happening…

The story they told him piqued his interest, and he followed them back across the border into Afghanistan to photograph the civil war. However, his journey to the rebel-controlled country was not an easy one.

He disguised himself by growing a full beard and wearing traditional Afghani attire, then snuck across the border through the mountains of Pakistan and into Afghanistan. The Russians invaded in late 1979, and McCurry found himself as the only working photographer on hand to shoot the invasion.

When he left the country, he hid his film inside his clothing – sewn into the folds of his turban and stuffed into his shoes and underwear.

As I was ready to leave, I got very nervous that when I crossed back into Pakistan, my film would be confiscated. So I put my film in my socks and my underwear. I sewed some of the film into my costume and into my turban, so that if I were arrested, I would at least keep my film safe. I wasn’t arrested.

I got a few pictures published in The New York Times. And when the Russians invaded six months later, I had all these pictures that nobody else had. Suddenly major magazines around the world – Paris Match, Stern, Time, Newsweek, and LIFE — were using my pictures.“

Steve McCurry

The resulting photographs – among the first photographic evidence of the conflict – were published in The New York Times, Time Magazine, and other newspapers around the world.

Recognition and Awards

The pictures opened the door for many other assignments and helped McCurry land his first National Geographic assignment in 1980. 

When I crossed the border to Afghanistan in 1979, just in time to document the Russian invasion, I didn’t dream that the country and her people, would have such a profound influence on my work and my life.

McCurry’s Afghanistan photographs won him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1980 s – an accolade that commends photographers for their courage and enterprise.

After his critically acclaimed Afghan War coverage, McCurry continued to deliver regular photo reports from international conflicts – including the Iran-Iraq War, Yugoslav civil war, the Cambodian Civil War, the Gulf War and the Lebanese Civil War – while returning again and again to Afghanistan.

In contrast to the more conventional war photographers like Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, and to a lesser extent, James Nachtwey, McCurry’s pictures highlight the human cost of conflict and the effect of war on innocent bystanders.

I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. I try to convey what it is like to be that person, a person caught in a broader landscape, that you could call the human condition. 

Steve McCurry

The Afghan Girl

In the 1980s, while photographing at a refugee camp in Afghanistan, McCurry took his best-known photograph – “Afghan Girl” – a powerful portrait of a young girl with haunting green eyes (finally identified in 2002 as Sharbat Gula). 

The image became one of the best-known covers for National Geographic and touchstone in his career.

McCurry snapped the image in a matter of minutes back in December 1984, inside a tent in a refugee camp in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; but he didn’t record the girl’s name, never imagining the power the picture would have. 

One day in 1984, at the refugee camp very close to Peshawar (Pakistan), I heard voices coming from one of the tents. It was a makeshift school for young girls. I asked the teacher there if I could take photographs.

Her eyes were the first thing that struck me. What interested me in that classroom that morning was actually that particular girl. I photographed other girls, but that was more just trying to position myself so that I could photograph her. She seemed pretty shy, a little bit troubled. I shot a few frames of her.

I spent about five minutes photographing her and then she quickly ran off to play with her friends. It was one of those cases, where all the elements of the picture came together in a magical way. 

Steve McCurry

McCurry shot the photo on Kodachrome 64 film using a Nikon FM2 and Nikon 105mm F2.5 AI-S lens.

In June 1985, the photograph appeared on the cover of the National Geographic magazine. It would later feature on the cover of the National Geographic 100 Best Pictures collector’s edition in 2001. It is also named “the most recognized photograph” in the entire history of National Geographic magazine.

I can understand why it moves people: she’s mysterious, ambiguous. She’s beautiful, yet she’s troubled. She’s persevering, there’s a fortitude in her. She’s poor, but she’s not timid. It’s a picture you can come back to time and time again.

Steve McCurry

Incidentally, the photo editor at National Geographic chose another image of Sharbat Gula in which she was covering her face to run as the cover for the magazine. Just before the magazine was to go to print, the magazine editor vetoed the photo editor’s choice and decided to run with the iconic photo we all know instead. 

The photograph would later represent to the world the plight and courage of the survivors of the Afghan War in the 1980s. 

The Afghan Girl Re-Visited

The image resonated so strongly that almost seventeen years later, in late 2001, with new turmoil in Afghanistan, the National Geographic Society and McCurry, launched an ambitious effort to find the long-lost girl who had become an icon in the West. 

In January, she was found living in poverty in the war-torn country, and McCurry photographed her again. This time he learned her name: Sharbat Gula. 

She was a striking little girl with an amazing look. I knew when I saw her it was going to be a powerful portrait. But her parents had been killed and life was difficult for her. When I began to search for her again I was told she had died in childbirth or been killed, but 17 years later we found her. It’s a very conservative place there, but we were happy we found her and [I was] relieved she was alive. I think she was happy she came to represent Afghanistan.

Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry’s Legacy

In his 40 year career as a photographer, Steve McCurry has traveled to the far corners of the earth to shoot conflicts, landscapes and cultures. But the one region that continues to occupy a special place in his heart is Asia. 

The thing that fascinates me about this region is that we’re all playing these different roles but we’re all part of the same human race. We’re the same, but we do things in different ways. We eat different foods, live in different houses, speak different languages.

Steve McCurry

Whatever the setting he happens to be shooting in, the emotional focus on his documentary photography invariably returns to the human factor. His affinity for photographing people has distinguished his work from others and has helped him earn countless awards.

McCurry has had several close calls – he was arrested in Pakistan, nearly drowned in a plane crash at sea in Slovenia, beaten up by a mob in India – and has been reported dead at least twice.

The part of my brain that’s concerned with self-preservation is very large. I always try to work within a margin of safety. You have to be alert and careful – and hope for the best.

Steve McCurry

Pirelli hired McCurry to lens the 40th edition of their famous calendar in 2013. The tyre company headed to Brazil and in a break from tradition, the models were shot with their clothes on in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. 

In 2015, McCurry was commissioned by Microsoft to take photographs in New Zealand, which were later used for their Windows 10 software.

Awards and Achievements

Aside from the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 1978, McCurry was awarded the Magazine Photographer of the Year award in 1984. 

He also holds the distinction of having won four first prizes at the World Press Photo Contest and the Olivier Rebbot Memorial Award twice.

In 2002, he was named Photographer of the Year by American Photo Magazine and the PMDA (Photo-imaging Manufacturers and Distributors Association). 

Steve McCurry founded ImagineAsia in 2004. The non-profit organization aims to work in partnership with community leaders and regional NGO’s to provide educational resources and opportunities to both children and young adults in Afghanistan. You can learn more about the project by visiting the ImagineAsia website.

McCurry received two Honorary Fellowships in 2006, one by the Royal Photography Society of Great Britain and the other by the New Zealand Institute of Professional Photography.

His work has been widely published internationally and McCurry frequently contributes to the National Geographic. In 1986, he became a member of the prestigious Magnum photos.

In 2019, Steve McCurry was finally inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.

Style

• Reportage, documentary
• Capturing mood, human spirit
• Use of color to create atmosphere and sense of place
• Storytelling, narrative-driven
• Simplicity, chance
• Immersion into community, getting to know subjects

How to Shoot Like Steve McCurry

Steve McCurry’s long association with National Geographic has afforded him opportunities to take months-long assignments in locations all over the world. 

When on assignment, McCurry usually travels with locals who serve as assistants, guides and translators, he often wears native garb and tries to blend in with his surroundings. 

A lot of what I do is just wandering and observing. I might see someone on the street and feel there is some story written on his or her face.

Like most photographers, he researches a country beforehand and draws up a list of locations, but once on location he lets the journey dictate what to shoot instead. 

I always try to hit the ground running. I try to have a translator lined up as an assistant; this is the main thing. It’s always good to have someone who can speak the local language, and who can navigate where to go and help if there’s a problem. But as far as research goes, I don’t ever want to do too much of it because, if you go with too many preconceived notions, it can spoil things.

Steve McCurry – Interview with Amateur Photography Magazine

Preparation and Good Light

McCurry plans his shooting days around the light. He prefers to shoot in soft light and heads out in the morning or evening (magic hour) when the light is at its most flattering. 

During the day when the sun is shining and the light is harsh, he’ll head indoors and shoot temples, markets, shops, etc

I try and set up my shooting day to be in a place where there is favorable light the whole day. In the morning, I might be outside. In late morning, I might be inside, so I’m always in a place where the light is working with me.

Working on Assignments

McCurry doesn’t look for pretty landscapes to shoot but instead focuses on story and the people of the land he is covering. His greatest photos are never planned, instead, he relies heavily on chance and happy accidents to occur to get the perfect picture.

You can’t get hung up on what you think your “real” destination is. The journey is just as important.

McCurry used to spend up to six months on an assignment for National Geographic but today his photo assignments tend to be much more focused, and over shorter periods.

You don’t need to spend six months or a year photographing everything that moves. You’re shooting stories, not novels. It’s better journalism and it needs more thought. For instance, you wouldn’t go to Brazil with the idea of shooting the whole country. You’d take less time and do a region, or maybe Rio.

What is important to my work is the individual picture. I photograph stories on assignment, and of course, they have to be put together coherently. But what matters most is that each picture stands on its own, with its own place and feeling.

Steve McCurry

McCurry’s Photography Philosophy

McCurry believes there are no shortcuts in photography and producing consistently great photos comes from hard work and dedication to the craft.

The unfortunate thing in life is that there is a lot of work involved, and often it’s tedious work. Some people buy a camera and wait around to get assignments. It’s wonderful they’re that naive. It’s like telling me you’ve got a first-aid kit so now you’re a brain surgeon. You have to find your own way.

Even if you don’t feel like it, you still need to get your photos on the assignment. The more photos you take, the more chance you have of capturing that great image. 

Sometimes we’re productive and sometimes we’re not, but you really have to average it out. Some days are good, some days aren’t, and you just have to understand that and relax. It’s like playing roulette: eventually, 22 is going to come up. I mean, even Shakespeare probably had an editing process.

Steve McCurry

Don’t be afraid of failure and making mistakes, even great photographers like Steve McCurry take bad photos – the difference is he doesn’t show them to the rest of the world.

Yeah, not every picture is brilliant! A writer might write something that ends up just staying in the notebook, and for a photographer… you photograph some things that you know are just as a record or something that you know isn’t brilliant, but you get the wheels moving. Am I going to wait for the perfect picture before I start shooting? Well, how many perfect pictures are there in a lifetime? Get out and start examining the world, start probing, and eventually…

Not all your photos are going to be keepers, the only thing that matters is the end result. 

And in the end, you’re just judged on the work. People look at the work – a poem, photograph, sculpture, whatever – and they don’t think, ‘How many drafts went into this, was it edited, how long did it take, how many revisions?’ It’s just the work that matters – you put it on the table, and either it speaks to you or it doesn’t.

Steve McCurry

In his film days, McCurry would shoot on average 30 rolls of film in a day. That translates to 1,080 images per day or 30,000 images on a one-month assignment that need editing, scanning, archiving and retouching.

The Human Connection

McCurry crosses borders of language and culture, in search of interesting stories that make for great photography. 

I always have a connection with the subject, whether it’s in a refugee camp or in a suburb of Bombay. I always try and establish some sort of a personal relationship, however brief. There are also times when you may be walking down the street and you photograph people in a fraction of a second. Sometimes the image looks as though it was the product of a long interaction when in fact, it was very brief. 

Steve McCurry

One of the reasons McCurry’s work is so powerful is because it focuses on humanity and life, a subject that we can all relate to.

A perfect example of this is his post-September 11th coverage of Ground Zero. 

McCurry pays a touching tribute to the hundreds who lost their lives, and also the many heroic policemen and firemen who worked tirelessly to get New York back on track. 

It isn’t necessarily about capturing the story but instead capturing the stories of the people affected by the tragic event.

Capturing Portraits

When it comes to his street portraiture, McCurry takes very few candid photos. Working with an interpreter, his portraits are made with his subject’s permission and typically from a close distance. 

The one thing that all McCurry’s portraits have in common is the focal point is the eyes of his subjects. He always tries to incorporate catchlights into the eyes of his subject too – this helps lift his images and gives them a certain spark/or pop. 

This is achieved 99% of the time through his use of natural light (after many years of experience). 

He never uses strobes but does carry small portable LED lights, which he uses to accentuate certain things in some situations.

Related Article: 150+ Portrait Photography Quotes

McCurry tends to isolate his subjects by shooting between f/2.8 and f/5.6 – just enough so his subjects stand out from their surroundings.

McCurry’s portraits are simple, yet they possess a magical quality about them. I consider his portrait work more documentary than classic portraiture (think Yousuf Karsh and Richard Avedon). 

I think people, when you first encounter them, they try and put on a particular mask. I don’t want people to try and look a certain way. I want them to be completely natural and just themselves, without kinda grinning, or smiling, or putting on some kind of silly expression.

His best portraits portray his subjects in their environment and there is very little interaction between the photographer and the subject. The key is to have your subjects forget they’re being photographed and to be patient.

In a portrait, you want something of that person to reveal itself. Some portraits look too controlled. I like to see the naked personality; I want to see something that is real and something that is raw. You don’t see the hand of the photographer; you see the uniqueness of that person. 

Steve McCurry

Take McCurry’s most famous photo, The Afghan Girl. McCurry spent five minutes photographing the refugee camp before finally taking a few frames of the shy and curious girl with green eyes. 

The portrait was essentially a grab shot. The candid image was taken more like a documentary photo, rather than a straight portrait.

If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.

Steve McCurry

In the video below, Steve McCurry talks to Huxley studio about portraiture and his process:

Good Photography and Storytelling

McCurry is known for his vivid color imagery and use of Kodachrome film. His reasoning behind this is simple: we see the world in color, so it makes sense to shoot it in color.

Below he explains how to make a good color photo:

I think the way to identify a good color photograph is to ask yourself if you convert it to black and white does it still have interest? Does it still have value? That would make a good story idea: let’s look at a series of color photographs, let’s just break it down, see how they work: the light, the design, the graphic quality. If it’s a good picture, whether it’s been shot in color or in black and white, then it’s successful.

On what makes great documentary photography: 

I think good documentary photography, on its highest level, gets into a realm where you’ve tapped into some archetype of human connection. You’ve struck a chord in people that has tremendous meaning beyond the event itself.

On the importance of storytelling in photography:

It’s similar to when you hear a song on the radio. There are some songs you connect with and others you don’t. It’s the same with books and movies. Pictures that are memorable, that stick in the mind, are the best pictures. Sometimes I’m looking at pictures and there’s nothing going on; there’s no emotion.

For me, great pictures are about storytelling. I want to learn something from the picture or want it to evoke some kind of emotion. I want it to take me somewhere.

Steve McCurry

If you want to learn more about Steve McCurry’s working process and the stories behind his most famous images then I highly recommend purchasing his book Steve McCurry Untold: The Stories Behind the Images 

What Camera Does Steve McCurry Use?

Steve McCurry uses a Nikon D810, which he has called the best camera he has ever owned. 

I completed a major assignment a couple of weeks ago and used just a D810 and a 24-70mm lens forir the entire job. I use that lens for about 98% of my work now. When I’m walking on the street, I’ll take just one body and one lens. I’ll have a back-up body and lens back at the hotel, just in case. 

McCurry also likes to use a single prime lens when he’s wandering the streets. Another favorite lens of his is the cheap and lightweight Nikon AF 35-70mm F/2.8D.

McCurry was an early tester of the Leica SL2 and did a promotional video for Leica in 2019. 

[I have] virtually no interest in equipment – period. It’s not what motivates me. I don’t want to talk about gear. Any camera on sale today will give you wonderful results. It’s how you do what you do, and whether you enjoy your photography. Manufacturers want to sell their cameras, and their ads are the same now as they were 30 or 40 years ago. 

Steve McCurry

Other cameras he has used over the years include:

Digital: Nikon D810, Nikon D4, Nikon D3, Nikon D700, Nikon D2X
Film: Nikon FM2, Nikon N90S, Nikon F5, Nikon F4, Nikon F100, Olympus OM2N

My first camera was a Miranda. Then I switched to a Pentax and then an Olympus. When I went to India in 1975 with my girlfriend, she had a Nikon and some lenses. I thought we should just use the same camera system and share the lenses, so I switched to Nikon, and I’ve been using it ever since – different models, of course.

The Last Roll of Kodachrome

McCurry moved across to digital in 2003, but for over 20 years he used Kodachrome film. When Kodak announced that they would be discontinuing Kodachrome 64, McCurry wanted to pay homage to the film that he used to create his most iconic images.

Kodak agreed to provide him with the last roll of Kodachrome ever made. For the project, he wanted to photograph iconic people and places. He started off in New York and did a portrait of Robert de Niro. Then he went back to India where his journey began and photographed Bollywood film stars and village nomads.

To complete the project, he made one frame per subject, using his digital camera to check the exposure and composition, similar to using a polaroid camera. 

The film was processed in July 2010 at Dwyane’s Photo in Kansas. Many of the images were published on Vanity Fair’s website. These images are now exhibited in the museum at George Eastman House, in Rochester, New York.

Note: See the recommended videos below to watch the full documentary.

Other Steve McCurry Resources

Recommended Steve McCurry Books

Disclaimer: Photogpedia is an Amazon Associate and earns from qualifying purchases

• Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, 2012
• The Stories Behind the Photographs, 2018
• Steve McCurry: A Life in Pictures, 2018

Steve McCurry Videos

The Last Roll of Kodachrome (2010)

In Search for the Afghan Girl (2002)

Behind the Scenes: Pirelli Calendar (2013)

For more Steve McCurry videos we recommend subscribing to his official YouTube channel.

Steve McCurry Photos

Looking for more Steve McCurry photos? Check out the image archive on Steve McCurry’s website.

Fact Check

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Sources

Official Steve McCurry Website, Biography
PDN Gallery, Q&A with Steve McCurry 
American Photo Jul-Aug 2006
Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, 2012
Pirelli calendar turns over a new leaf, The Guardian, 2012
It’s All Mixed: An Interview with Steve McCurry, GUP Magazine, 2013
Iconic ‘Afghan Girl’ Portrait Was Almost Passed Over by Editor, Peta Pixel, 2013
The Steve McCurry Interview, The Sartorialist, 2013
Leica Stories, Leica SL2, November 2013
N Photo Mag, March 2014
Steve McCurry: The interview, Australian Photography, 2017

Steve McCurry: The Iconic Photographs, 2012
The Stories Behind the Photographs, 2018
A Life in Pictures, 2018

The Last Roll of Kodachrome, 2010
In Search for the Afghan Girl, 2010 
Magnum in Motion: Steve McCurry, 2011
Behind the Scenes of Pirelli Calendar, 2012
The Stories Behind the Photographs Promo Video, Phaidon, 2013
An Interview With Steve McCurry, TEDxAmsterdam, 2015
Steve McCurry on Portraiture, Huxley Gallery, 2020

The post Steve McCurry: The Journey Is Just as Important appeared first on Photogpedia.

To capture those images, McCullin risked his life on many occasions. He was shot and wounded in Cambodia, expelled from Vietnam, had a bounty on his head in Lebanon and imprisoned in Uganda. He’s also braved bullets and bombs not only to get the perfect shot but to help wounded civilians and dying soldiers. Compassion and emotion are at the heart of all his photojournalism work.

McCullin has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting famine in Africa, poverty on the streets of London’s East End or the horrors of war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Congo. Many peers including photojournalists at world-renowned Magnum have called him the 20th century’s greatest photographer. 

He is also well known for his landscape photography, producing powerful black and white photos of the Somerset countryside – where he has lived for 30 years – as well as France, India and the rest of Britain. 

In 2013, he became the first photojournalist to be awarded a CBE and in 2017 he received a knighthood for services to photography. Now in his 80’s, Sir Don McCullin remains a compassionate chronicler of our world. Let’s hope he continues to photograph for many years to come.

Related: 58 Don McCullin Quotes on Photography and Life

I feel at the edge of my journey with photography now. I’m older, more knowledgeable, but I’m never satisfied, never arriving, always looking for something better to come. I’m a lost soul without photography.

Don McCullin Biography

Name: Don McCullin
Nationality: English Photographer
Genre: Photojournalism, War, Landscape, Documentary, Portrait
Born: 9 October 1935 (age 84 years) – London, England

The Life and Career of Don McCullin

Early Life

Don McCullin was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park, a poor and rough area of London at the time. Growing up during World War 2, McCullin was exposed to war from an early age. 

Like all my generation in London, I am a product of Hitler. I was born in the thirties and bombed in the forties.

Don McCullin, Unreasonable Behaviour

As a child, the dyslexic McCullin found schoolwork difficult but excelled in drawing and painting, winning a scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts. After the death of his father in 1950, he was forced to forfeit the scholarship and left school at fourteen without any qualifications.

After leaving school, McCullin first worked as a dishwasher on a steam train and then as a messenger boy for an animation studio in Mayfair, delivering cans of film. 

When he was called up for National Service in 1954, he told recruiters that he worked in the movie industry, so he was placed in the Air Force, renumbering old wartime film stock at RAF Benson in Oxfordshire. 

Later, he would be posted to the Canal Zone during the Suez Crisis in 1955. He was first sent to Kenya then Egypt and finally Cyprus, working as a photographer’s assistant. 

McCullin worked in the darkroom, handling photographic paper and chemicals, printing up to three and half thousand photos daily. It was during his time in Kenya, that he developed an interest in photography and purchased his first camera, a Rolleicord. 

For thirty pounds I bought a new Rolleicord camera. I went into Nairobi and photographed people at the bus stations. That was my first real encounter with film and photography.

Start in Photography

McCullin completed his National service in late 1956 and returned home, finding work as a darkroom assistant for the animation company he worked for prior to his stint in the Air Force.

Armed with his new camera, he began photographing friends from a local gang named “The Guv’nors”. After one of the members of the gang was arrested for murdering a policeman, McCullin was persuaded to show his photos to the picture editor at the Observer newspaper.

In 1959 the Observer newspaper published a story about a gang and its murder of a policeman in north London. Alongside it was my photograph of the gang, who lived in the area where I grew up. Seeing my name under the photograph (and being paid the princely sum of £50) gave me an enormous feeling of achievement. Where we came from you read only the Sunday Graphic or the News of the World. The most important thing to me was to see my father’s name on the page. All my working life I’ve driven myself to make his name have some meaning, which I think I’ve just about achieved.

The Newspaper paid McCullin £50 for image rights. At the age of 23, McCullin earned his first commission and began his career in photography, which was more by accident than design.

That gang picture was the ticket to rest of my life.

Learning Photography

Frankly, I didn’t really know anything about photography. I’d just been taking snaps. I had to learn very quickly. But after that famous picture of the gang was published in The Observer, I was offered every job in England – just because of that one picture. 

McCullin was a self-taught photographer. He learned photography through experience and by buying a stack of second-hand books in 1965 when he was working at The Observer. The photograms and books he acquired were published between the dates of 1886 and 1926.

They cost me ten quid, which was a lot as I didn’t earn much. Those books became my photographic university. I still refer to them today. You never stop learning. You never stop discovering. I’m constantly being surprised.

Shaped by War, 2010

Photography Career

Then I got married and went to France.  I was in the Café de Flore in Paris, and I looked over this bloke’s shoulder who was reading the newspaper and saw that famous picture of an East-German soldier jumping over the barbed wire.  I said to my wife, “After we go back to England, would you mind if I went to Berlin?”  This was in 1961, and my wife would never say no – she was very kind and sweet.  So, when we got back to England, I rang The Observer and said, “I’m going to Berlin”, grabbed my last seventy quid out the bank, bought an airline ticket and rolled up in Berlin.  I stayed there a week and shot everything on the Rolleicord.

This photo essay along with the images of “The Guv’nor’s” secured him a permanent contract with The Observer in 1961. That same year, he won the British Press Award for the Berlin Wall photo essay.

The War Photographer

McCullin was assigned projects in London initially, but commissions soon took him around the globe, starting with the Cyprus War in 1964. This was McCullin’s first foray into a conflict zone and the images he produced are some of his finest. These photos earned him a World Press Photo Award and catapulted him into the field of international photojournalism.

I’ll tell you right now, Robert Capa had been killed in 1954 in Indochina, and there was this job vacancy – I wanted to be, not Robert Capa, but the best war photographer in the world, which is a really silly thing to say. I knew that, but I thought that you should look for an area that you’re suitable for. I came from Finsbury Park, I was tough, I wasn’t afraid, I challenged everyone who challenged me, I challenged everything. I thought, “I’m cut out for this job.” When I came back from Cyprus, I realized that – with my speed, and my attitude about war – that’s where I belonged. I suddenly found my little place in the world.

For the next two decades war became a mainstay of McCullin’s photojournalism, at first for The Observer and then from 1966, The Sunday Times. At the time the publication was one of the world’s most respected outlets for reportage stories and a perfect fit for McCullin’s hard-hitting images. He subsequently spent 18 years with the magazine and would often have as many as 16 pages devoted to his photo essays. 

Photography has given me a life… The very least I could do was try and articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster. Anything less would be mercenary.

Conflict Zone Assignments

McCullin’s assignments for The Sunday Times include Biafra (1969), Northern Ireland (1971), Bangladesh (1971), Uganda (the mid-70s), Afghanistan (1979), Lebanon (1982), and El Salvador (1980s). His best-known work from the period is his photos of the Vietnam and Cambodia wars.

It’s playing Russian roulette really; there’s no other way of putting it. There was a day when one of my cameras got hit by a bullet. I didn’t have a helmet or flak jacket, and there was a sniper that was killing all these guys around me. I was running across this paddy-field with ten Cambodian soldiers; one young boy was carrying a flag – he must have thought it was still Napoleonic days – and he was the first to get hit. Then all of the other guys got hit and I hid behind the radio operator because he had this big square metal thing on his back. That didn’t work, because bullets were lashing from all over, so I thought, “Fuck this, I’m not going to get killed”, and threw myself down in the water and slime.

To keep my cameras dry, I was dragging them along the side of the paddy-field. I didn’t see the bullet hit my camera, but when the water ran out, I ran like fuck across this field. I could hear bullets and mortars going over, and I was zigzagging in order to be a bad target. When I finally got back about three-hundred yards, away and out of range, I was covered in mud and thought that I’d better check my cameras. And wallop, there was a bullet-hole in my Nikon.

Back in England

In the 1970s, McCullin turned his attention to England and the deep divisions of class and wealth in his homeland. For the project, he photographed the people of Bradford, Durham, Liverpool, and the homeless in London’s Whitechapel.

I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of other people. I knew I was capable of another voice.

In 1982 the British Government refused to grant McCullin a press accreditation to cover the Falklands War. At the time he believed it was due to the-then Thatcher government deeming his images too disturbing politically. It later emerged that it was simply an administrative decision made by the Royal Navy who had already allocated their quota of press passes. 

Then in 1984, when the world heard about the famine situation in Ethiopia, McCullin was left bitterly disappointed when The Sunday Times decided not to send him to cover the story.

I should have gone on my own, jumped on a plane by myself. It showed me up. I was at my best then. [Sebastião] Salgado deserved his praise, but this story was made for me. I was left at the bus stop.

Going Freelance

McCullin decided to leave The Sunday Times in 1984 and go freelance. After two decades of covering wars, he decided it was time to explore other genres of photography, devoting more time to his landscape and still life photography and accepting portrait commissions. 

In the 80s and 90s, McCullin continued to travel internationally. He visited countries like Indonesia, India, Syria, and Africa, returning with powerful stories on places and people that, in some cases, had limited or no previous encounters with the Western world. 

Perhaps his most notable and ambitious project in recent times was his exploration of the ruins of the Roman Empire across North Africa and the Middle East, which was documented in his book Southern Frontiers: A Journey Across the Roman Empire (2010).  

Just Call Me a Photographer

McCullin dislikes being categorized as a war photographer, describing the term as “being like that of abattoir worker.” Throughout his career, he has also documented many humanitarian themes and events. He was once described as “a conscience with a camera” by Sir Harold Evans, the former editor at The Sunday Times.

In the ‘60s, McCullin took the images for the Beatles White Album. His photos from the photo session were later published in the book, A Day in the Life of the Beatles. He was also paid £500 to shoot the stills used in Antonioni’s film Blow-Up starring David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave.

Don McCullin’s reputation as one of the greatest photographers of conflict has since been replaced with Don McCullin the great travel and documentary photographer. Look at his work in Africa or his incredible black and white landscapes of Britain, India, and France to see the range and depth of his work. 

Awards and Legacy

Don McCullin has been awarded countless awards including the Word Press Photo of the Year 1964, and the Cornell Capa Award by the International Center for Photography in New York in 2006 for his lifetime contribution to photography. In 1993, he became the only photojournalist to be made Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and in 2017 was awarded a knighthood for his services to photography. A well-deserved honor for Britain’s greatest photographer. 

Sir Don McCullin is the author of more than a dozen books (mostly published by Jonathan Cape), including his acclaimed autobiography Unreasonable Behaviour (1990) and Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition retrospective (2015). 

His book, Shaped by War (2010) was published alongside a major retrospective at the Imperial War Museum North in Greater Manchester. The museum displayed over 250 of McCullin’s photographs, as well as his contact sheets and various personal memorabilia from his life in photography. In 2019, Tate Britain also presented a hugely successful major solo retrospective of his work.

Don McCullin’s Photography Style

When it comes to Don McCullin’s war photos, they are more a personal view of the conflict, rather than news stories. Not what happened, but what it was like. 

When entering conflict zones, he would go in unobtrusively, remaining focused and disciplined while carrying very little equipment. He learned early on how to remove himself from dangerous situations and to trust his instincts. He also knew how to smuggle his film out if necessary. 

A sense of timing is the most important part of the life of a professional photographer. I have an uncanny way of being at the right place at the right time. And if the time is not right, I can be patient, stay in that place for hours, willing things to come.

The most important thing was capturing the image and telling the story. Everything you need to know is there in his pictures. Yet there’s something about them that goes beyond their immediate context. His black and white photos of wars and famine are honest, truthful and still to this day continue to haunt. 

We don’t live in a black and white world, but once you see a black and white photograph, it haunts you. I have done a few pictures of wars in colour, but they don’t work – they feel too cosy – while black and white photographs will penetrate your memory.

His photos may not be pretty, but they’re some of the most important in history and will continue to be viewed for many hundreds of years. How many photographers can say that about their work? Not many…

I look for drama – drama is the key factor in all my work.  

The McCullin Approach

When it comes to understanding how McCullin works in the field, below are two excerpts from an interview with Aaron Schuman for Hotshoe Magazine in 2016. You can read the full interview (recommended) by clicking here:

I want to get the composition right. I’ve got no time to be the great master of anything; I just have to get the picture. Also, I always worried about exposure – I didn’t want to take a picture that was underexposed and then be killed. There are so many things going on, and I’ve always put my hands into fate.  But you’ve got to stand up, and you’ve got to get the composition right.  I just gambled and gambled, all the time.

I’m definitely trying to get information across, but within a formal composition.  And I’ve got to do that in a split second; I’m dealing with 125th of a second – it’s the blink of an eyelid.  Most people have a bit longer than that to make a decision, so I’ve got to be bloody quick. I try to foresee things, and always be two steps ahead.  My mind has been sharpened like a pencil, like a needle. I’m like a surgeon in a way: I have the sharpest scalpel in the world, and it’s my brain.

I’m always under pressure, always worried, and in those days, you had to wait weeks to bring the film back to England and have it processed. Can you imagine the discipline? I had such discipline, and I’ve still got it. I had a great respect for film and knew you mustn’t spoil or abuse it. I always used to go to Vietnam with thirty rolls of Tri-X film – nothing more, nothing less.

Photographing the Story

I used to concentrate on the battle, on the soldiers in the front, but of course, that was never the true story. The true story for me later developed into the suffering of civilians.

McCullin has only set up a photograph once and that was his famous image of the dead Viet Cong soldier surrounded by his modest possessions. 

I came across the body of a young Viet Cong soldier. Some American soldiers were abusing him verbally and stealing his things as souvenirs. It upset me – if this man was brave enough to fight for the freedom of his country, he should have respect. I posed him with his few possessions for a purpose, for a reason, to make a statement. You see, I’d developed a mind by then, I was my own man and I’d got attitudes. I felt I had a kind of puritanical obligation to give this dead man a voice.

McCullin always stayed true to his methods of working. He would often return to England to process and print his film before sending it to editors, while other photographers would continue shooting and send their films back instead. The advantage to his method is that it would remove him from danger at the right time, with many others perishing while trying to capture the action, after staying in the field too long. 

Many critics have suggested that McCullin “feels” his images, rather than takes them, which is something agrees with: 

Photography isn’t about just pushing that button. It’s about the experience of being there. I bring to my photography the principles of my mind and what I’m trying to do. I’m bringing the direction of who I am and what I’ve seen. I’m bringing my identity to it with my printing and my composition.

Editing his Work

When it came to editing his work, McCullin was ruthless and would only show his best photos, which was rarely the case for other photojournalists of the time.

I always gave the art department a very tight edit, and they never asked for more. They trusted me – after all, I had risked my life on many occasions for them and I’d earned the right to make my own selection.

However, McCullin has admitted to overlooking his iconic Vietnam image, the close-up of a shell-shocked American soldier. When he arrived back to the UK, he was exhausted and with his deadline fast approaching rushed the editing process. “I was too busy looking for the action pictures and missed it. It taught me a lesson.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson once compared McCullin’s photos to the work of painter Goya, who was known for his dark and mysterious creations, but McCullin dismisses the comparison to the artist or any art for that matter. 

I have a strong creative desire but I’m not trying to be an artist. I don’t need titles. I hate the title, ‘artist’. I just describe myself as a photographer. I have a good nose for news. It’s about knowing your trade. There’s no confusion in my approach. I’m not wide-eyed, I’m precise, direct. I work to a set of rules, ethics. I don’t like wasting film. I have respect for film.

I’m not an artist, even though I compose my pictures as best I can. In a split second under fire, some people wouldn’t bother, but I’ve stood up in battles and put up the exposure meter first because I’m not going to get killed for an underexposed negative.

Don McCullin’s Influences

McCullin names Alfred Stieglitz as his biggest influence, followed by Edward Steichen and Josef Sudek.

The first photographer whose work I fell in love with was Alfred Stieglitz. He had a discipline that I admired, which was not to let anything out of the darkroom that wasn’t the best.

Also, I have always loved Josef Sudek’s work. I put him on the top of my list, even though I weaned myself on Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Sudek lost his right arm while in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War and had to load his film with one hand, sometimes using his teeth. War must have made him feel he had to turn his disadvantage into the poetically beautiful: photographs of condensation on the windows of his Prague flat, flowers, the tree in his garden in winter. He was a bit like me in one way, because he started experimenting with darkness, and in the end, his pictures looked as if he had just got a felt-tip pen and made a square of black. He was entrenched in that moment of darkness, like a wave of his past coming back to him.

The following are also named as influences in various interviews with McCullin over the years: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frederick Evans, Peter Henry Emerson, Henry Peach Robinson, Francis Frith, and David Roberts.

What Camera Does Don McCullin Use?

McCullin is a film man and loves Kodak Tri-X. In 2012 he started using Canon 5D cameras and continues to use them alongside his medium and large format film cameras today. 

For more than 50 years, McCullin primarily used 35mm film cameras with his favorite focal lengths: 28mm and 135mm. He always had two cameras with him: one with the 28mm and the other with the 135mm. Along with his trusty Gossen Lunasix 3 lightmeter around his neck.

For his recent work, the 28mm has been replaced by the 35mm.

Although McCullin has used Ilford films in the past, he is a Kodak Tri-X man through and through. 90% of the time he would rate his film at standard box speed (either ASA 320/400) unless he was shooting in low light then he would rate his film at 800 or 1600 instead. To produce a useable negative, he would then push (overdevelop) his film in the development process to produce useable negatives, resulted in an increase in grain giving images a rawness that adds to their authenticity. 

Camera History

McCullin started off using a Rolleicord in the early ‘60s. He changed format to 35mm and Nikon F cameras around the mid-’60s. The Nikon F is famous for saving McCullin’s life when he was on assignment in Cambodia. When the Vietnamese forces he was accompanying were ambushed, the Nikon blocked a bullet aimed at McCullin’s head from a sniper attack.

In the ‘70s, McCullin switched to Olympus, starting with the OM1 and later the OM2. The OM-1 caused a sensation in the photography world when it was launched in 1973 because it represented a massive improvement in 35mm SLR design. The camera was more compact and lighter than the competition, giving photographers more freedom out in the field without a reduction in quality. To read more about McCullin’s experience of Olympus, you can read the article here.

First Steps into Digital 

McCullin continued to use Olympus and Rolleiflex cameras until he switched to Canon digital cameras in 2012. Here’s a great insight McCullin’s process from an interview with Canon in 2016:

Very often looking ‘down there’ [he moves as if to mimic looking through his old Rollei] works better because people are less aware. I’ll give you an example of that: I went to the Southern Omo valley in Africa a few years ago with two cameras; a medium format and a 35mm. The moment I held the 35mm camera to my face the people wanted money. So, I popped a wide-angle lens on the medium format, looked down to focus so they thought I wasn’t actually taking a picture, and got them all for free…

Seeking the Light and Canon

The 2012 promotional video, Seeking the Light sponsored by Canon shows Don making his journey into the world of digital photography armed with two Canon 5D Mark III cameras and his favored 28mm and 135mm lenses. 

It should be noted that in other documentaries such as Don McCullin: Kolkata and Don McCullin: Looking for England he used a Canon 35mm F1.4L II and the Canon 135mm F2L lenses with two Canon 5D Mark IV’s.

Since being introduced to the world of digital photography McCullin has used the cameras on a few of his more recent projects including Syria, India, and Iraq. However, it should be noted that his landscape photos are still shot using medium-format (Mamiya Super 23) and larger format cameras such as the Linhof Technika. 

Digital cameras are extraordinary. I have a dark room and I still process film, but digital photography can be a totally lying kind of experience, you can move anything you want … the whole thing can’t be trusted really.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2015, McCullin recalls one of his best experiences, standing on Hadrian’s Wall in the middle of a blizzard, “If I’d have used a digital camera, I would have made that look attractive, but I wanted you to get the feeling that it was cold and lonely.” 

Recommended Don McCullin Books

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• Don McCullin (2015) *Must Own Book
• Don McCullin: The Landscape (Cape, 2012)
• Don McCullin: In England (Cape, 2007)

Recommended Don McCullin Videos

McCullin

This 2012 Bafta-nominated documentary about Sir Don McCullin reflects on his life and career working as a photographer. McCullin talks openly about his time covering wars in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East as well as photographing Africa and the famine crisis. This is the best documentary on McCullin and a must-watch for all photographers out there.

Sir Don McCullin in Kolkata

This is more of a promotional video by Canon for Canon cameras but it’s still a good watch to see Don work his magic on the streets of Kolkata. If you’ve ever been interested in how the legendary photog goes about his business in the field, then this short video will give you a better idea. You should be able to pick up quite a few tricks by watching this. Okay, so the photos aren’t his best work but seeing the great man practicing his craft is a good enough reason to watch this. I would have preferred him to use two Olympus OM’s loaded with Tri-X but I don’t think Canon would have paid him to do that. Instead of his usual 28mm/135mm setup, he instead opts for a Canon 35mm 1.4L II and a Canon 135mm F2L.

Contact Sheets Volume 1: Don McCullin

In this 13-minute masterclass on photography, McCullin provides commentary on some of his famous photographs and how he arrived at the decisive moment for each photo. You’ll find yourself watching and re-watching this video over again to learn from McCullin’s experience. Exploring McCullin’s visual journal provides us with an invaluable insight into his working methods and is another must watch for all photographers.

Looking for England

This BBC documentary first shown in 2019 follows Don McCullin (83 at the time) as he documents the inner cities to seaside towns of England, on a journey in search of his nation. 60 years after his first photos of The Guvnor’s in 1958, Sir Don returns to his old haunts in Bradford, the East End of London, Scarborough, Consett, and Eastbourne. It’s also the first time he has allowed cameras into his darkroom. This is a charming documentary that provides a wonderful insight into the work of Don McCullin.

Available to watch on the BBC only.

Fact Check

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Recommended Links

Don McCullin Official Website
NY Times, Don McCullin Is a War Photographer. Just Don’t Call Him an Artist
Don McCullin: The Interview, Tate Museum

Sources

Unreasonable Behaviour: An Autobiography, Vintage, 2002
Shaped by War, Cape, 2010
The Impossible Peace, Cape, 2012
Don McCullin: The New Definitive Edition, 2015
Contact’s Volume 1: Don McCullin, 2005
McCullin Documentary, Morris/Morris, 2012
Seeking the Light, Canon, 2012
John Tusa Interview with Don McCullin, BBC Radio, 2013
Irreconcilable Truths, Canon, 2016
Sir Don McCullin in Kolkata, Canon, 2017
Looking for England, BBC, 2019
Don McCullin Biography, Hamilton Gallery
The extender Interview: Don McCullin, Hotshoe Magazine, 2016
Don McCullin talks war and peace, British Journal of Photography, 2019
I remember: Don McCullin, Readers Digest
Don McCullin Interview, Apollo Arts, 2020

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