The Landscape

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His experience as a traveller reinforces the sense of a man on the edge of civilisation under siege. The finest British photojournalist of his generation, he has received many honours and awards including a CBE. The years of dodging bullets and photographing subjects on the move trained his eye to be quick, but this slower work hinges more on patience. The copy in near fine condition has some slight toning to extremities of pages and a minor soft bump to top right corner of front cover.

McCullin is reluctant to place himself in the company of artists, partly because he never wants to feel that he’s ‘arrived’ – ‘The moment that happens, I know I’m finished’ – but also because of the nature of his material. After a career documenting conflict for over sixty years, iconic war photographer Don McCullin now focuses on documenting the landscape. We were surrounded by McCullin’s signature black-and-white images, none of which depict starving children or shell-shocked marines. He worked for the Sunday Times for eighteen years and covered every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands War.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.

Nice to see some early if naive shots from the 60s to the more up to date images, just a few new images. He is still sharp in his 80s, and teases people with gallows humor, cracking jokes about his own death. In part, he thinks, it’s because his body is starting to break down – he is strong for his age but becoming frail nonetheless: he suffers from arthritis, the darkroom chemicals are starting to make his chest wheeze – but it’s also an after-effect of the major retrospective he staged at Tate Britain last year.The Landscape is the last in a long series of books published by Jonathan Cape, which encompasses the entirety of McCullin’s working life.

The thing about mythology is that it’s heavily overloaded; most stories over time have been packed with embellishment.Somerset Levels, Glastonbury 1990s (platinum print)McCullin seeks salvation within the British countryside. 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 once again offered him asylum, and he has now been living there for the past three decades.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace. McCullin’s lens extends across the United Kingdom, documenting pensive rural scenes that include Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland; the River Cam, Cambridgeshire; Rannoch Moor and Glencoe, Scotland. That exhibition presented a huge selection of images from McCullin’s career, from his days documenting 1950s working-class life in Finsbury Park – the first photograph he sold, of a Teddy boy gang in a derelict building, was one he took in his spare time with a camera he had bought while on national service – to most of the major wars of the late 20th century (many photographed for the Sunday Times, his main employer for years), to social reportage in the north of England. One of the reasons McCullin remembers his childhood years in Somerset with such fondness is that soon after he left, his mother ‘shipped me out again’, this time to Manchester. A far cry from the world’s conflict zones and the war-scarred north London of Holloway Road where his career began.

He inspires me, be inspired yourself and dive in if you love the landscape and the true art of photography.