Don McCullin on Norman Lewis
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2017
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1968 Norman Lewis wrote an article called Genocide in Brazil. The photographs that accompanied it were by Don McCullin.
Lewis later said that this one piece of journalism was the great achievement of his life. It led directly to the creation of Survival International and a change in the law relating to the treatment of indigenous people in Brazil.
Lewis is known as a brilliant writer - one of our best, said Graham Greene, 'not of any particular decade of our century'. He's best remembered for A Dragon Apparent and Naples '44.
Don McCullin didn't travel with Norman Lewis to Brazil, but they struck up an unexpected friendship. He was like my father, the great photographer says.
And in Norman Lewis's later years they worked together in Venezuela, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. But McCullin didn't read many of his books. "I struggled through Naples '44" he admits. Yet his admiration for the way Lewis opened his eyes to the world remains undimmed.
Recorded on location at McCullin's Somerset farmhouse with Norman Lewis's biographer Julian Evans.
Presented by Matthew Parris.
Produced at BBC Bristol by Miles Warde.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, |
| 0:24.6 | you're doing the wrong thing. |
| 0:26.0 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:27.8 | Listen to all episodes on BBC sales. |
| 0:31.3 | This is the BBC. We're doing things a bit differently. This time I've just zoomed from |
| 0:40.2 | London to Castle Carey and driven to Don McCullen's house in Somerset. I'm standing in a little lane |
| 0:48.4 | in the depths of rural England. You would perhaps expect a photographer to live in a beautiful place in a |
| 0:55.2 | sweet house with lovely views and Don McCullen does we're about to go in. |
| 1:01.3 | I'm saying you said that I'm a stone thing you said that. |
| 1:03.0 | So, no, come and sitting out of me comfortable. I don't care. |
| 1:06.0 | Good. |
| 1:07.0 | Yeah, Matthews now become a total silhouette. |
| 1:10.0 | And it definitely is KG Beast. |
| 1:13.0 | Okay. |
| 1:15.0 | This is the home of Sir Don McCullen, photo journalist with the observer and the Sunday Times, now 81, and he told us that he finds even traveling up and down the road to Bristol a trip too far which is ironic considering that he made his name as a star photojournalist in far-flung places in Biafra in West Africa and elsewhere. |
| 1:37.5 | He was wounded in Cambodia, locked up in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam. |
... |
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