Self-flagellation is nothing new for Don McCullin - but in a recent interview with the Observer's Andrew Anthony, conducted to coincide with the opening of a new exhibition, he was particularly scathing.
Like Martin Parr, he noted that he has "a wonderful life" - and yet "I feel uncomfortable because I don't think I deserve this much". The extent of his moral torment, as a renowned documentarian of conflict, was clear: "You don't have the right to steal other people's images, more so when they're suffering and dying. I've committed some very unpleasant deeds. I'm like a moving train that's carrying a sackload of shit."
A major problem, as he sees it (and as he told the Guardian's Emine Saner in December), relates to the impact of his work - or lack of it: "It's worthless to me because it hasn't changed a thing." Anthony gently demurs, noting that "[c]onflict prevention seems an impossibly high bar by which to judge photography or any other journalistic or artistic form". In any case, there is surely some value in simply bearing witness to atrocity - a point on which Joel Goodman, Jenny Matthews and Philip Hatcher-Moore agreed at last year's Eye Festival. Few have done so as powerfully and consistently as McCullin.
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