The Landscape

Product Information

This book brings together for the first time a collection of McCullin's landscape photography, primarily set against the stormy backdrop of Somerset, where he now resides. 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.

He has an acute sense of how the emptiness of his immediate landscape echoes a wider tone of disquiet. I couldn’t be happier than when I am standing out on a cold winter morning waiting for the right light. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his repeated views of the glories of Palmyra and of the destruction of this ancient Syrian city. Not even—he insists on this point—the still-life compositions that he shot in his garden, which were inspired by the Dutch Old Masters. He has documented Roman ruins in North Africa and the Levant, including the recent deliberate destruction of the ancient site of Palmyra in Syria by ISIS.When I look at some of his drawings, people are looking up for salvation, just before they’re being shot. Canon Professional Network | Español - Película con Don McCullinViñedo cerca del pueblo de Laurens, región de Languedoc-Roussillon, Francia. Some of McCullin’s recent landscapes include photographs from his ongoing “Southern Frontiers” series. 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. It’s all yours, no one can say you’re doing the wrong thing morally, there’s not a human being that can come up and say “Why are you taking my picture?

The obvious assumption is that McCullin turned to landscape photography as an escape from the stresses and trauma of covering war. His ominous skies and ever-present water – ponds, rivers, saturated fields, the flooded Somerset Levels – hint at the destructive power of our climate, too. The physical landscapes are not usually awesome in themselves but McCullin's treatment makes them inspiring subjects for us to enjoy. Trees become jagged etchings across the clouds; Hadrian’s Wall, photographed in the snow, is a scar running through the countryside; a flooded field in Somerset looks like the Somme – and, indeed, prompted the Post Office to commission him to photograph the First World War battlefield, where he also shot The Road to the Somme, France.In a split second under fire, some people wouldn’t bother, but I’ve stood up in battles and put up the exposure meter first, because I’m not going to get killed for an underexposed negative.

I’ve cleared all the crap out of there and I’ve set the dishes up to go in there on Monday morning next week. The Landscape ] comes as a timely reminder of the photographer’s darkness of touch … the large-scale pictures take the reader with McCullin on a landscape journey both at home and abroad. 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 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. Having been evacuated to the safety of Somerset during the Blitz, McCullin has had a lifelong connection with the open farmland and hill country of the South West, feeling at peace within the solitude of the expansive landscape.I’ve photographed dead people and I’ve photographed dying people, and people looking at me who are about to be murdered in alleyways. 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. His photography engages the energy of the land—its history, character and expression—documenting it on film and paper. This summer, McCullin’s hugely successful retrospective, which opened at Tate Britain last year, travels to Tate Liverpool. Not far from here is the probable site of the Battle of Edington, where King Alfred repelled an army of Vikings.