The Landscape
By Don McCullin
2019
First Published
4.35
Average Rating
184
Number of Pages
After a career spanning 60 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. He has not sought out the quiet corners of rural England, but 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 center 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.
Avg Rating
4.35
Number of Ratings
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Author
Don McCullin
Author · 11 books
Don McCullin grew up in north London and was evacuated in 1940 to Somerset. He failed the eleven-plus examination and went to Tollington Park Secondary Modern School. He won a trade art scholarship to the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts and Buildings. His father, who was an invalid, died, aged forty and McCullin was forced to find work to earn money for the family. He became a pantry boy on the London, Midland and Scottish Railway dining cars, travelling between London and Manchester. In 1950 he went to work in a cartoon animation studio in Mayfair before the Observer newspaper bought one of his gangland pictures and set him on the road as a photojournalist. He moved to the Sunday Times, where he worked for eighteen years. His photographs of almost every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands war provide some of the most potent images of the twentieth century. His pictures are in major museum collections all over the world. He is the holder of many honours and awards, including the C.B.E. His home is in a Somerset village.
