The Landscape

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In his photo, the pond is a silver disc, shining out beneath a lowering sky; today, it’s bright blue, a dot of stillness among the muddy winter fields. I couldn’t be happier than when I am standing out on a cold winter morning waiting for the right light. 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 presence of sacred mounds, hill forts, ancient roads and the nearby monuments of the prehistoric era have shaped his sense of nationhood. The obvious assumption is that McCullin turned to landscape photography as an escape from the stresses and trauma of covering war. Nice to see some early if naive shots from the 60s to the more up to date images, just a few new images. McCullin is a striking person to spend time with, still consumed by photography, good-humoured and reflective about the craft and ethics of his profession – but the conflict that has shaped his life is never far from the surface.This countryside gave him refuge during World War II, when he and other children were evacuated there from London during the Blitz. 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. McCullin has never had trouble motivating himself to work – he talks of photography choosing him, rather than the other way round – but just recently, he says, he has found his mind beginning to drift.

In the beginning, the manual labor was a sort of therapy, distracting him from thoughts of the horrors he had witnessed. The room is packed from floor to ceiling with archive boxes of prints and negatives whose labels say things like ‘Cambodia’, ‘Beatles’ and ‘Not too bad’. 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. This personal survey of over 60 landscape photographs includes scenes across the United Kingdom, Europe and further afield, revealing the photographer’s innermost feelings through powerful compositions of wild heavens, haunting vistas and meditative still lifes.Some of McCullin’s recent landscapes include photographs from his ongoing “Southern Frontiers” series. The Landscape is the last in a long series of books published by Jonathan Cape, which encompasses the entirety of McCullin’s working life. He has a lot of stories like this from his youth: the damp basement flat in which his family lived, which contributed to the early death of his asthmatic father; harsh schools with ‘sadistic’ teachers. Unsurprisingly, a darkness pervades the images, and he says some people are confused about whether he is trying to frighten them or bring them pleasure. In the 1970s, burned out and haunted by a decade of photographing war, McCullin turned his attention to England, producing a series of photographs – of Bradford, of Liverpool, of County Durham, of London’s Whitechapel – that laid bare the deep divisions of class and wealth in his home country.

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.

His ominous skies and ever-present water – ponds, rivers, saturated fields, the flooded Somerset Levels – hint at the destructive power of our climate, too. It’s a journey McCullin first made at the age of five, when he was evacuated in 1940 from his home in Finsbury Park, north London. 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. His photography engages the energy of the land—its history, character and expression—documenting it on film and paper.