Don McCullin - The Landscape (2018)
Hardback book signed by Don McCullin in black marker pen - very rare to find
ARTIST Don McCullin
DIMENSIONS 35.6 x 2.5 x 29.2 cm
ISBN 9781787330429
HARDBACK Yes
PUBLISHER Jonathan Cape Publishing
NO OF PAGES 184
'The veteran war photographer [Don McCullin] has turned his lens to more peaceful scenes... for his latest book, The Landscape. The images carry a dramatic feel and a preference for stormy skies that reveal an intimacy with conflict and destruction.' Guardian
After a career spanning sixty years, Sir Don McCullin, once a witness to conflict across the globe, has become one of the great landscape photographers of our time. McCullin’s pastoral view is far from idyllic. Though the woods and stream close to his house in Somerset have offered some respite, he has not sought out the quiet corners of rural England. He is drawn, instead, to the drama of approaching storms. He has an acute sense of how the emptiness of his immediate landscape echoes a wider tone of disquiet.
McCullin is based in the geographical centre of southern England. The presence of sacred mounds, hill forts, ancient roads and the nearby monuments of the prehistoric era have shaped his sense of nationhood. But down on the Somerset Levels, he has tramped through the flooded lowlands. 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.
He is not alone in his preference for darkened clouds over clear skies. McCullin’s West Country is not far removed from the East Anglia of Constable’s Dedham Vale two centuries earlier. His knowledge of his historical predecessors places him deep in a Romantic tradition. His experience as a traveller reinforces the sense of a man on the edge of civilisation under siege. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his repeated views of the glories of Palmyra and of the destruction of this ancient Syrian city.
The Landscape is the last in a long series of books published by Jonathan Cape, which encompasses the entirety of McCullin’s working life.
A native Londoner, McCullin (b.1935) began to take photographs in the 1950s documenting his surroundings and local community. He is best known as a photojournalist and war correspondent, recognised for his iconic images taken on assignment in Vietnam, Cyprus, Lebanon, and Biafra. However he also has consistently engaged with social documentary practice in Britain, repeatedly visiting cities such as Bradford and Liverpool, and London’s East End, documenting the poverty experienced throughout the country. McCullin also has a long an ongoing engagement with landscape photography both in Somerset and Scotland and more specific ongoing projects such as ‘Southern Frontiers’ documenting the physical remains of the Roman Empire in the Middle East and Africa.
Sir Don McCullin was born in 1935 and grew up in a deprived area of north London. He got his first break when a newspaper published his photograph of friends who were in a local gang. From the 1960s he forged a career as probably the UK’s foremost war photographer, primarily working for the Sunday Times Magazine. His unforgettable and sometimes harrowing images are accompanied in the exhibition at the Tate with his brutally honest commentaries.
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