The Landscape

Product Information

McCullin is a striking person to spend time with, still consumed by photography, good-humoured and reflective about the craft and ethics of his profession – but the conflict that has shaped his life is never far from the surface. McCullin selected the 70-odd works on view from some 60,000 negatives, and he personally printed all of them in his dark room at home. He worked for the Sunday Times for eighteen years and covered every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands War. The imagery of his home county, ravaged by storms, inevitably projects the associations of a battlefield, or, at least, the views of one intimate with scenes of war. The veteran war photographer has turned his lens to more peaceful scenes in recent years and for his latest book, The Landscape.

And although the majority of the images featured are from Great Britain, it also includes stunning scenes from Syria, Iraq, France, Morocco, Sudan, India and Indonesia. McCullin has never had trouble motivating himself to work – he talks of photography choosing him, rather than the other way round – but just recently, he says, he has found his mind beginning to drift. They show a less familiar side of the world’s most renowned photojournalist, known above all for his images of war and poverty. In his photo, the pond is a silver disc, shining out beneath a lowering sky; today, it’s bright blue, a dot of stillness among the muddy winter fields.This new collection mixes recent with past work, showing how no one has ever been able to accuse McCullin of wielding a frivolous camera. McCullin’s landscapes take simple elements – trees overhanging water, a pond, a flooded field – and transform them, through his use of light and dark, into dramatic, clashing compositions on his characteristic monochrome prints. This is a beautifully produced photographic book containing sublime views of England shrouded in mist, snow, water or cowering beneath an overwhelming sky. In theory, the subject matter couldn’t be further away from some of his most famous pictures – grieving women during the civil war in Cyprus, a shell-shocked US soldier in Vietnam, rough sleepers in east London, the war in Lebanon – but there is an affinity between the two sides of his work.

Beginning in the early 2000s, McCullin began documenting physical remains of the colossal Roman Empire in North African and Levantine landscapes, including the ancient site of Palmyra.Seeking to convey the mysterious and mystical quality of the light in this part of the world, this evocative series presents us simultaneously with overwhelming beauty and reminds us of the fragility of our natural environment. On the way, he describes how he’s planting trees – poplars, chestnuts, walnuts and limes – in the valley beneath his house.

Although people are absent from his landscape photographs, they also raise uncomfortable questions about our future. In the beginning, the manual labor was a sort of therapy, distracting him from thoughts of the horrors he had witnessed.The two years he spent in Somerset, however, left him with an ‘idyllic’ memory that he kept with him over the years and which eventually, in the mid 1980s, drew him back. A master printer, he tears up scores of prints he considers inferior, because ‘When I die I don’t want people to find prints that aren’t good enough. The book also features landscape images from throughout his career taken in Syria, Iraq, Indonesia and India. Looking forward to the valley of the tombs which Isis have destroyed, Palmyra, Syria 2016Don McCullin is one of the most important war photographers of the late 20th century, best known for his broad reportage and critical social documentation. Often referring to the British countryside as his greatest salvation, McCullin demonstrates the full mastery of his medium with stark black and white images resonating with human emotion.