McCullin Page #3

There were tanks facing each other.

At that stage, in Friedrichstrasse,

they were actually building the beginnings of the Berlin Wall.

This was really the right place to be.

- NEWSREEL:

- Camera crews are harassed by reflecting mirrors

held by East German police.

Water hoses are played on equipment.

Nevertheless, our reporters are able to come up with remarkable pictures,

despite these hazards.

My camera equipment wasn't very good, actually.

I had a camera I had bought during my time in the air force.

It was totally the wrong shape

to give me the kind of pictures that I needed.

But, nevertheless, I stretched the use of this camera, kneeling down

and holding it up high and doing all kinds of funny things with it.

By the time that I'd been there a few days,

that wall went up pretty fast. And people could not escape.

And I looked at East German soldiers

leaning out of buildings on the other side of the wall, with binoculars.

And looking right at me. And I thought,

"They can't hurt me, because they're over there and I'm here."

It was very exciting, it was at the heightened part of the Cold War

where the Russians were quite prepared

to make a stand against the West, and vice versa.

What it really comes down to is that I was sitting on top of

the most important news story in the world.

And it was my decision,

this intuition that took me there in the first place.

So, I was beginning to show signs of having a brain

that was functioning in the right direction.

I came back to England with the film

and got it processed in the Observer's darkroom.

And they saw the pictures and they ran half a page of my story.

The story was then entered into the news category

for the News Pictures of the Year. And I won this award.

And the Observer gave me a contract after that.

So, I started getting better jobs at the Observer.

I started going to all kinds of political rallies and things.

I would go to the East End of London

and photograph disturbances with Oswald Mosley, situations like that.

It was a developing and an expanding situation

for the early part of my career.

- NEWSREEL:

- The tinderbox that is Cyprus threatens to erupt

into a full-scale war.

Greek students demonstrate against British and US proposals

that a force of NATO troops help maintain a truce on the island

until differences between Greeks and Turks can be resolved.

I walked into the Observer office one day, and the editor said to me,

"How would you consider covering the civil war for us in Cyprus?"

And at that point in my life, I wasn't ready.

And I felt that, when I think about those words, I think,

I must have been levitating. I felt as if I was rising off the ground.

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