It is at night that the past comes back to haunt Don McCullin, 90 next year, one of Britain’s greatest living photographers. Inside his head are the ghosts of two decades of war, and what he calls a lifetime of shame after growing up among the violent, thieving gangs of Finsbury Park. 

“I’ve worked like a Trojan to eradicate the shame of my background, and I don’t think I’ve done it,” he says, “but, in a way, I think my background was the making of me in this world because I understood poverty, I understood pain and suffering, and I understood the class difference that goes on in this country. 

“I was baptised in violence but I had a very good grooming for the life I’ve had. If I had been overeducated, I would probably have had a mental breakdown.” 

It is 60 years since McCullin first went to Cyprus in 1964, leaving behind his first wife Christine (who died in 1984, two years after he left her for another woman) and their young family, to cover the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension in the civil war. He saw his first dead body then, before he was 30 years old, and also won his first award, a World Press Photo Award. 

In 1961, as a young untrained photographer, he had already captured the building of the Berlin Wall. McCullin has always been wary of the “iconic” image – but there have been many: the emaciated 24-year-old Biafran woman breastfeeding her child; a starving albino child in Africa; boys boxing in London’s Caledonian Road.