The Landscape

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On the way, he describes how he’s planting trees – poplars, chestnuts, walnuts and limes – in the valley beneath his house. 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. 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. Although people are absent from his landscape photographs, they also raise uncomfortable questions about our future.

Photographer Don McCullin has spent the last six decades traveling to remote locations and witnessing harrowing scenes of conflict and destruction.

The veteran war photographer has turned his lens to more peaceful scenes in recent years and for his latest book, The Landscape. I couldn’t be happier than when I am standing out on a cold winter morning waiting for the right light. The presence of sacred mounds, hill forts, ancient roads and the nearby monuments of the prehistoric era have shaped his sense of nationhood. The pictures in this room are documents of historical events, but they are also history in their own right.

They show a less familiar side of the world’s most renowned photojournalist, known above all for his images of war and poverty. This driving force to connect and reflect on sacred locations and diverse communities continues further afield across to India and Indonesia, where McCullin has documented local rituals, festivals and architecture. McCullin has been taking landscape photographs since the 1990s, capturing scenes from across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia when not on assignment.There is energy, the energy of history around this landscape here,’ McCullin tells me, as we look out of his living-room window, across the valley in front of his house. They are things that neither glossy magazines during the heyday of print journalism nor the accolades showered on him by the British establishment can quite contain. Guardian After a career spanning sixty years, Sir Don McCullin, once a witness to conflict across the globe, has become one of the great landscape photographers of our time. Looking forward to the valley of the tombs which Isis have destroyed, Palmyra, Syria 2016Don McCullin is one of the most important war photographers of the late 20th century, best known for his broad reportage and critical social documentation.