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The Landscape

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After years of photographing bloodshed, McCullin was so haunted by what he had seen that he decided to stop. He took up landscape photography instead, capturing the tranquil English countryside surrounding his home in eastern Somerset. For his recent book Southern Frontiers (2010), he made elegiac images of Roman ruins in North Africa and the Middle East – including the ancient city of Volubilis in Morocco. Other images haunt him at night. A few months after surviving Hué, McCullin was covering the Biafran war in south-eastern Nigeria. “Can you imagine in Biafra a million died of starvation? I stood in front of 600 children at a school who were standing on legs that could barely carry them. They were dropping down in front of me and dying.” He pauses. “I’m talking as if I’m completely mad and a liar and imagining these things. I question myself all the time. But it did happen. I have the pictures to prove it.” Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.”

Despite being a tough Londoner by birth, McCullin’s Somerset roots run deep – he first came to the county as an evacuee in the war and has lived near Bruton for many years. There are also scenes from farther-flung locations, such as Syria and India. Wherever he shoots, McCullin’s composition is dramatic and arresting, and the darkroom toning utterly breathtaking. It’s difficult to describe the inhumanity I’ve seen. My upbringing, I think, prepared me. I was exposed to all sorts, early on. Had I been more sophisticated, I’d have had a mental breakdown decades ago. About the Artist Don McCullin is one of the most important war photographers of the late twentieth century, best known for his broad war reportage and critical social documentation. Between 1966 and 1984, he worked for The Sunday Times Magazine under Editor-in-Chief Harold Evans and Art Editor David King, it was during this time he released his most celebrated images. He has since expanded his oeuvre with independent trips to India, Africa and the Middle East, continuing to raise awareness of global humanatarian issues and war-torn areas with unflinching honesty.These images will be displayed alongside a series of gelatin still life compositions, composed by McCullin in his garden shed and developed in his dark room at home. McCullin often refers to these still lifes as providing a deeper form of escapism than his landscapes, drawing inspiration from the great Flemish and Dutch renaissance masters. It is the emotional durability and intuitive presence of McCullin throughout the entire journey of image making, from capturing to developing, that allows us a rare insight into the redemption he has found from the land and place he calls home.

Regular readers will already be aware of the stunning work of landscape pro Jeremy Walker. His debut book, published in 2020, takes a look at some of the UK’s lesser-known hidden gems found hidden away from the more obvious landscape destinations. And so I had to make that camera do everything. I tried every way of using that camera to get a different angle. The Russians and the Americans were facing each other with armoured vehicles and, you know, you look into these photographs, and we’re looking…a lot of them, you’re looking into East Berlin, and if you look at the uniforms of the East Berlin police and soldiers, they are very reminiscent of Nazi uniforms that you would have seen in the Second World War. I was using that kind of atmosphere to show tension, really, and division. The civil war in Cyprus was his first conflict and encounter with the dead in warfare. The power of his pictures showing the bodies of Turkish Cypriot men killed in their home was dependent upon him also showing their family’s vivid expressions of grief. It was in relation to this experience that he has spoken about the beginnings of “self-knowledge”, stepping away from feelings of resentment over his life being uniquely tough and “learning empathy”. McCullin was deeply affected by the trauma of reporting from some of the most violent conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century. When he returned home from these assignments, he often turned his attention to the tough lives of people in Britain. He photographed communities living in northern cities like Bradford and Liverpool, focusing on areas that had been neglected and left impoverished by policies of deindustrialisation. Often these trips were made on his own initiative, rather than being sent on assignment by a newspaper. McCullin saw similarities between their lives and his own childhood. Although he was ‘reporting’ on poverty and social crisis, he also identified deeply with his subjects, picturing the lives of others as a means of learning more about himself.

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Hollywood types have never impressed me much. It’s doctors, aid workers and teachers who I admire. People who dedicate their lives to humanity, with dignity and kindness. FR: But in a way, then, maybe you’ve turned to a kind of poetry of the image, or a kind of lyrical photography, with tonal ranges that are different, more studious, larger formats. . . . In other words, you talk about it as informational, the “Roman Empire,” but you’re doing something else. You’re showing the light and the beauty, the metaphors. You’re working in a broader way. It’s like you have a bigger palette now. From the early 1980s increasingly he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He travelled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. In 2010 he published Southern Frontiers, a dark and at-times menacing record of the Roman Empire’s legacy in North Africa and the Middle East. The exhibition concludes with three unseen Arctic landscapes captured by McCullin in 2019 during a trip to Svalbard. The journey was the culmination of a lifelong ambition to immerse himself in this ever-changing hostile environment. McCullin welcomed the challenge and experience of total isolation in the frozen lunar arctic landscape, seeking to convey the mysterious and mystical quality of the light in this part of the world. As with most of McCullin’s landscape images, this evocative series presents us simultaneously with overwhelming beauty and reminds us of the fragility of our natural environment.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Southern Frontiers, Chateau La Coste, France (2019); Don McCullin Retrospective, Tate Britain, UK (2019); Don McCullin: Proximity, Hamiltons Gallery, UK (2019); Don McCullin, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, US (2018); Conflict – People – Landscape, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, UK (2015). Categories However his greatest asset was his instinctive sense of what made a great photo. He calls himself a travelling inquisitor, "turning over stones and seeing if there’s any life underneath them, like you do as a child on a beach." In 1971 McCullin travelled to Bangladesh and India. He covered the Bangladesh War of Independence, which was fought over nine months that year. At the time, Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan and was under a joint administration with West Pakistan. By 1971, Bengali people from East Pakistan were demanding increased autonomy and later, independence for East Pakistan. Following demonstrations, thousands of troops arrived from West Pakistan. On 26 March, civil war erupted, pitting the West Pakistani army against the uprising East Pakistani people. Both the online and physical exhibitions follow McCullin’s major retrospective at Tate Britain, London in Spring 2019, featuring over 250 photographs that celebrate the scope and achievements of his entire career. The survey exhibition is due to travel to Tate Liverpool later this year.First published over 20 years ago, this gorgeous book has sold more than three million copies worldwide. Aerial images from multiple journeys across five continents and 60 countries provide a comprehensive survey of the Earth from a spectacular vantage point – and from a time before drones made it more commonplace. In the newer edition, over 100 new pictures are included, as well as essays from leading experts and environmentalists. Land by Fay Godwin That picture, taken in the 1980s, is one of more than 70 landscape and still-life photographs that McCullin has selected for an upcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset (25 January–4 May). They show a less familiar side of the world’s most renowned photojournalist, known above all for his images of war and poverty. The photographs are selected from throughout McCullin’s long career, which began in the 1950s and has taken him all over the world, from devastating conflicts to key moments in British post-war popular culture – but the majority of the photos on show have been taken within a few miles of his house. At 84, McCullin is still working, and the landscapes are now his driving passion. 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. The largest body of work featured in the exhibition explores local areas within walking distance of the photographer’s home, including ‘The River Alham near my house, Somerset’ (2007), ‘The Dew Pond, Somerset’ (1988) and ‘Batcombe Vale’ (1992-93). McCullin is able to evoke dramatic painterly representations of his home county with quiet confidence, shifting between the flooded lowlands of the Somerset levels to woodland streams, nearby monuments and historic hill forts. The landscapes in Britain and Southern Frontiers occupy the final rooms of the retrospective. We see them after seeing all the horrors that McCullin has photographed—an aesthetic reward, of sorts. But at the same time this turn to the pictorial, is not that far removed from what came before. Pictorial form has always been central to his photography.

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