Thankyou for that - fascinating.
Not sad in its essence, but in its context.
I'd imagined him tucked up in an armchair in the north of England somewhere. Or
gone, and I hadn't heard.
Oddly, I bought a copy of his autobiography today - 'Unreasonable Behaviour'.
The title seems that much more apt now.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.soultheft.com
Author/Publisher: The SLR Compendium - http://www.blurb.com/books/3732813
On 23/01/2013, at 1:23 PM, Tina Manley wrote:
> PESO:
>
> This is long but very interesting and sad.
>
> Tina
>
> From the NPPA list:
>
> I am sharing this with you with permission. A living legend's perhaps last
> war:
>
>
> Sent: lunedì 21 gennaio 2013 12:56
> To: Burton Anderson; mamma
> Subject: McCullin An article by Anthony Loyd about his experience in Aleppo
> with "living-legend" photographer Don McCullin:
>
>
> DON McCullin troubles me. In his strong mind he is 40, maybe 45, but his
> body is 77 years old. He roars at night in his sleep, the shouts loud but
> dulled by the bundle of blankets under which he sleeps on a cold stone
> floor.
>
>
>
> I wonder if it is the ghosts of Vietnam or Biafra or Beirut or the Congo
> that pester his dreams, but when I ask, he says it is "Chelsea buns" that
> make him shout so. Here in Syria he is my responsibility and I slightly
> resent this, for that young mind and old body make him difficult, as errant
> and vulnerable as a young dog by a main road.
>
>
>
> I realise that this resentment is there when I seize him one day, roughly,
> and scrape him hard and fast down the edge of a wall and through a doorway.
> I am trying to protect him when I do this. But I am also angry with him.
> Someone is trying to kill us. Two shots from an unseen sniper have just
> split the air in bullwhip cracks beside us, in an empty street with many
> ruins, and he doesn't move fast enough because he cannot run, or will not
> run, and he is right in my way, plodding along in between me and the cover
> of a doorway, so I grab him hard, shouting in his ear, and propel him
> forwards. He spins around with shock and twists his leg painfully and I
> feel bad about it, not as bad as if he had been shot dead, or if I had been
> shot because he was too slow and in the way, but bad anyway, because he is
> a hero of mine and it is an uneasy feeling hurting, manhandling and
> shouting at a hero, while feeling a bit resentful and unkind.
>
>
>
> ...The feelings do not go away so I think about them for a long time. There
> is respect and admiration for him, and the awareness of being in the
> company of a real English gentleman - a brave, cultured, well-mannered
> human being. He is tough and well put together, too, broad shouldered and
> strong, though his medical history includes a stroke and a bypass. He
> fought three coppers at once only a few years ago. Yet there is also this
> resentment. At first I wonder if it is caused by staring into the mirror of
> another man in war and seeing a foreshadowing of my future. It is simpler
> than this, though. Eventually, I realise that my unease springs from an
> unanswered question that shadows my every step with that man in that city.
>
>
>
> Why has Don McCullin, an iconic figure among photographers, chosen to
> return to war 15 years after he left conflict behind? Why has he asked me
> to lead him to Aleppo - a city that tramples over its old and weak in a
> careless rush to kill its young, its strong and virile - as an old man, to
> see war one last time?
>
>
>
> At different times he gives different answers. One of his sons is a Royal
> Marine serving in Afghanistan. Sometimes McCullin says he wants to show
> solidarity with his boy's risk. At other times he claims to want to
> photograph what others can't. In unguarded moments he says he is just
> curious. Once or twice he remarks that he is back in war because he has
> become bored.
>
>
>
> Until I know the answer to that question I cannot feel easy in his company.
> I did not want to be guide to an old lion-hunter looking for one last shot
> against the creep of the clock. Syria kills too quickly to mess around
> there with half-formed musings or vanities. I want it to mean more to him
> if it is to mean anything to me. McCullin will have to work out his
> reasons, his legitimacy for being there, if we are to be any more than
> bell-ringers together, tolling time on dusty memories of yesteryear's wars.
>
>
>
> I fear Syria. It would be an easy place to forget one's bones, to leave
> them behind in an untended olive orchard or the rubble of a MiG-bombed
> house. The war there once made me weep. It killed a friend of mine. Another
> is missing. In six assignments to the country since last January I have
> learnt to double my risk margins, to work fast and leave quickly. At 46,
> and 20 years into the game, I am at a bad age for war correspondents. Too
> much of survival is based around the simple laws of chance and probability,
> so I'm gambling on a bad credit rating, which means I have to play very
> careful hands of cards.
>
>
>
> In September I'd left Aleppo scared, unnerved as much by the insecurity
> there - the feral fragmentation of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) - as by
> the shelling and airstrikes of the regime. The FSA unit I was working
> alongside had lost 20 per cent of its strength in little more than 48
> hours. In my last minutes there that northern autumn I'd been pinned into
> buildings at the edge of the Bab al-Hadid gate of the medina - the old,
> walled section of the city - by a precise artillery barrage called down
> upon us by Syrian army observers on the battlements of the gate. An
> enduring memory is of a young FSA rebel, laughing just seconds earlier,
> pale with shock and pulling up his stained T-shirt to look at a shrapnel
> wound to his stomach. How quickly it can all go wrong. I was in no hurry to
> return.
>
>
>
> So when McCullin asked to accompany me to Aleppo when I next went back
> there, I had mixed feelings. Among them was a sense of privilege. I was in
> my early teens when I first became aware of McCullin's work. His
> photographs burnt their way into my mind's eye like the lasting impression
> of a light bulb on the retina. I can see the images now as I write, having
> no need to look at any of his work on my study bookshelves to recall the
> grief of the Cypriot widow; the US soldier throwing the grenade in Hue; the
> skeletal albino Biafran child; the mandolin player standing triumphant over
> a dead girl in Beirut.
>
>
>
> Responsibility was another feeling swilling in the mix. I did not want him
> to be a liability. He had been out of war for a long time. He claimed he
> wanted to go to Syria "to produce a strong set of images" that he said he
> hadn't seen emerge from the conflict so far, but it seemed an impossible
> aspiration after so long away from war, and I wondered even then why he was
> really going.
>
>
>
> Through the beat of windscreen wipers the roads changed in the rain, which
> poured unceasing from low drifting banks of sombre grey cloud, the smooth
> stretch of the Turkish highway giving way to the narrow undulations and
> ruts of Syria. Low cloud meant no MiGs. Russian air attacks in Chechnya
> years before had taught me there are no heroes in an airstrike. Grown men
> dig themselves into the ground with their fingernails to escape the attack
> run of a MiG or Sukhoi. So let it rain.
>
>
>
> McCullin was happy to be going to war again. He said he wasn't, and made
> noises about the terrible nature of war, but he was. The edgy rush of
> adrenalin had picked him up and tuned him. He laughed a lot, his voice was
> full and rich and his eyes twinkled. A few hours passed and the world
> disappeared by degrees into a slick blur of greys and greens which wrestled
> behind misted windows. Then the greys picked up and smothered the greens,
> which meant we were in Aleppo. I took McCullin to his quarters, an empty
> apartment in a building already hit by artillery, where the rain dribbled
> through a shell hole in the stairwell roof to run down the stairs.
> Artillery regularly landed around the building. He looked quite at home.
>
>
>
> I took him to the front the next morning. Among the restless heave and
> throb of Aleppo, a sprawling urban war zone in which two million people
> still managed to survive - denied electricity, and critically short of fuel
> and food - the front line meandered in a rough crescent shape that included
> the medina at its heart. If you ignored the cold and hunger and stood in
> the city's quieter suburbs, the damage was slight and suggestions of war
> seemed far away, until the rumble of artillery bounced through the streets
> or a MiG roared overhead. The closer you got to the front lines, though,
> the more the evidence of war grew, the rubble and glass and yawning,
> burnt-out apartments mounting and merging until they were as featureless
> and ruined as any Grozny or East Mostar, to the point at which you ended up
> scurrying around the labyrinth of tunnels that connected the cellars
> beneath buildings, rubbing shoulders in the gloom with the FSA rebels, some
> of whom wielded pickaxes and lamps to chip out new holes among the debris:
> the place where men and their great civilisation were reduced to
> troglodytes among dripping ruins.
>
>
>
> In such circumstances, Syrians regarded McCullin's age with wonder. "Were
> you in World War I as well?" one young FSA fighter asked him. The rebels
> were fascinated by him. In a culture that respects the status of elders, a
> few of them seemed quite overawed at the venerable foreign pensioner in
> their midst. Much later, some people passed verdict on McCullin's
> appearance in Aleppo on the quality of his photographs. They missed the
> point. His photos would never be the same as in his heyday, any more than
> the blows of a comeback boxer could compare to their era as champ. It was
> his presence that carried the punch.
>
>
>
> For Syria's war is characterised most strongly by absence and collective
> abandonment. Other than the protagonists and victims the arena is almost
> empty. There is no foreign military intervention. There are no NGOs or aid
> workers distributing food and blankets. The media is similarly self-exiled:
> very few broadcasters or newspapers commit journalists regularly, if at
> all. A handful of freelance photographers work inside the country, but none
> of the big names. The middle-aged bravehearts of Bosnia and Afghanistan
> have grown old and too soft for the hardships of Syria, while the economics
> of journalism have not allowed their replacement generation to prosper.
> That McCullin, still a prizefighter despite his years, had hauled himself
> out to that lonely war zone was inspiring in itself, legitimising the work
> of the few freelancers already there and challenging the absentees.
>
>
>
> It seemed entirely fitting that on that first morning in a battered street
> in the Al Sha'ar neighbourhood, as we sat around a brazier with some
> fighters trying to warm our hands, three freelance photographers appeared.
> They comprised probably 50 per cent of the entire foreign media presence in
> the city, so were used to being alone. In their late 20s and early 30s, by
> the nature of their profession they would have all been familiar with
> McCullin's work. And here he was, sitting by a brazier near the front, a
> statue stepped down from its plinth in flesh and blood and good humour,
> warming his hands and surveying the destruction as nearby machinegun fire
> rattled down a street, as easy with the situation as some men would have
> been with a morning's walk to the station. They were thrilled.
>
>
>
> A couple of days later we travelled to Moshaat, where a garrison of regime
> troops was being besieged by rebels. The rain had gone overnight and the
> skies were unusually blue and clear, curdling my mood. For 20 minutes we
> weaved across orchards and through crawl-holes knocked in compound walls as
> we neared the front line. Jets flew overhead, and evidence of their
> previous depredations lay clearly around us, in buildings crushed by the
> mighty fists of bombs.
>
>
>
> At the front line, a group of rebels took turns to fire through holes in
> the wall as McCullin photographed them. Then a handful of young hotheads,
> unable to contain their exuberance, sprinted forward to lob a grenade into
> the regime's position. McCullin planted himself to photograph the scene,
> feet widely apart, in a space totally devoid of cover. The youths fell back
> laughing as the Syrian troops blazed retaliatory fire in their direction.
> "See that, they are happy now," McCullin said, hooking a thumb towards the
> rebels as fire cracked over the walls. "So am I. I love this. This noise
> never bothers me. I feel at home."
>
>
>
> I found it a profoundly sad remark to make. His helmet was askew and he was
> puffing hard beneath the weight of his body armour, but he was smiling
> fixedly at the sound of the shooting. Was this really what he was after, I
> wondered humourlessly. A last hit off the action amid the misery of Syria?
> Was this what awaited me, too? The anger lasted with me throughout the
> night, and I was haunted by memories of an old Yugoslav who had described
> to me how Tito, wheelchair-bound and barely coherent, had been trundled to
> a forest clearing by his cronies to shoot his last bear. It was tethered to
> the ground by chains.
>
>
>
> I was wrong. He was no Tito. There was something much more dignified at
> stake with McCullin's presence in Syria than the desire for a final shot,
> just one more composition of someone else's nightmare. He was more complex
> and introverted than I had imagined, and whatever questions I may have had
> concerning his reasons for returning to war, his own questions hunted
> harder. If he could not articulate it, that was simply because he hadn't
> known the answer when he arrived in Aleppo: he had gone there to ask
> himself the question "What am I doing here?". It took a few days before the
> shape formed. It did so in the crump of artillery in a street in the city's
> north.
>
>
>
> It was mid-afternoon and we were in the Al Sha'ar district again when it
> happened, near a clinic not far from where a hospital had been reduced to
> an empty wreck by a regime jet a fortnight before. Unusually, we were both
> in a good mood. McCullin had spent the morning among Aleppo's growing
> population of poor. He despised the term "war photographer" for its
> limitations - he has sold more prints of landscapes than of war - and,
> seeing him work with Syrian refugee families squatting in freezing
> apartments that stank of shit and burnt nylon, I understood why. The echoes
> of a damp wartime basement flat in Finsbury Park, north London, were still
> close. The years may have glamorised and elevated him, but he was relaxed
> and familiar among those with cracked hands, cold children and worries on
> their mind: his social chronicling of the war experience seemed much more
> three-dimensional than his courage in action.
>
>
>
> Then came the detonations. A residential area was being targeted. The first
> vehicles arrived a minute or two later, screeching to a halt outside the
> clinic. The first was a flatbed pick-up. There were three dead men in the
> back. Shellfire can really play havoc with a human body. The first man was
> all guts and tatters and dead beyond doubt, but they hauled him onto a
> stretcher anyway for the sake of some relatives there. No one bothered
> moving the other two for some time.
>
> Dirck Halstead
> dhalstead@xxxxxx
> 6500 Champion Grandview Way
> #27208
> Austin, Texas 78750
> 512 402 0854
> (cell)202 288 4838
> http:dirckhalstead.net
>
> "We haven't come this far because we are made of sugar candy"
> Winston Churchill
>
>
>
>
> --
> Tina Manley, ASMP
> www.tinamanley.com
> --
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