Overview

McCullin’s has been creating still life arrangements in his garden shed at home in Somerset since the early 1980s.Each still life has been lyrically constructed with the natural—cut flowers (lilies, fox-gloves, gladioli), fruit or fungi—often presented alongside beloved mementos of his travels; a bronze dragon from the orient, a junk shop vase, a Hindu goddess. He arranges disparate inanimate objects with fruits and flowers as a kind of shrine to pay respect to the idea of transience versus permanence. These self-styled altars act as a homage to beauty, to the changing seasons and the fleeting passage of time. The landscapes in the book are gathered from throughout McCullin’s career—from early photographs of the Industrial North of the UK, to India, Africa and more recent images taken closer to home. Shot to enhance a metallic light, lowering skies and the denuded trees; there can be a sense of foreboding and desolation in the landscapes, as if the photographer were contemplating the aftermath of a battle scene. Vast eternities are suggested in his expanses of desert sand and biblical drama in his silver-edged cloudscapes. Any figures in the frame are incidental and merely contribute to the composition—a departure from the human-focused documentary work for which McCullin became known.

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9781915423948

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Reviews

""Don McCullin spent decades photographing war and carnage across the globe - then he retrained his lens on the Somerset countryside. As he turns 90, a new book celebrates his gorgeous still lifes and landscapes.""--The Guardian

Author Information

Don McCullin (b.1935) grew up in Finsbury Park, London. He began taking photographs during his military service and brought his camera back with him to the UK, beginning what would be a life-long commitment to photography. In 1961 McCullin travelled to Berlin just as the wall was going up , and his resulting photographs earned him a contract with The Observer. He went on to work for major British newspapers during some of the most violent conflicts of the late twentieth-century including Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, Lebanon, Northern Ireland and more recently Iraq and Syria. Whenever he returned home, McCullin would turn his lens on still-life and landscape as akind of therapy and solace. His landscapes have been the subject of solo exhibitions at international galleries, Hauser& Wirth and Hamiltons Gallery, and are held in the collection of V&A, Tate, London where McCullin enjoyed a major retrospective in 2019

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