"I like my pictures to be dark and I like being in the dark"

Reading his memoir Aperture, you get the impression that the late photographer John Downing was rather relishing the opportunity to recount his escapades in various hellholes around the world over the years. There's an element of male bravado about the many tales of tight scrapes and near misses, and he seems to have been able to blank out the terrible scenes he saw and captured on film, or at least to switch off in between assignments.

Not so Don McCullin, who in this interview with the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries comes across as genuinely haunted by his experiences in such places as Northern Ireland, Beirut and especially Vietnam. "Wherever I go", he says, "there seems to be violence and death."

He also appears to be painfully conflicted about the fact that he's made a career as a war photographer: "I certainly feel guilty. I'm constantly persecuting myself with thoughts that make me uncomfortable. They snatch away the joy I could probably have enjoyed." By contrast, such concerns don't seem to have troubled Downing greatly - or at least they don't receive much of a mention in Aperture.

Like Downing and David Hurn, McCullin was fortunate to work during the golden age of photojournalism, before the circulations of daily newspapers plummeted and when photographers' work was still seriously valued. Understandably, his blunt declaration "There is no photojournalism any more" has attracted criticism, perceived as the view of an arrogant dinosaur ignorant of or belittling the work of those who have followed in his footsteps.

It's not true, of course, and what Jeffries doesn't point out to his interviewee is that photojournalists have long been fascinated by the supposedly mundane, trivial and/or frivolous; contrary to McCullin's claim, this is not a recent development. Indeed, McCullin himself took to referring to his close friend Hurn's subject matter as "tinsel society" in the 1960s without necessarily implying that Hurn was any less of a photographer as a result. Perhaps, then, the statement is best understood simply as an old man seeking to crudely mark out his own remarkable legacy.