The Landscape

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The landscape once again offered him asylum, and he has now been living there for the past three decades. 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.

What they don’t understand is that what was once a great country which stole other people’s resources by colonising, [no longer has] that choice any more to steal from other countries. Although people are absent from his landscape photographs, they also raise uncomfortable questions about our future. He is adamant, however, that he is only a ‘trespasser’ in the art world, and would rather be known simply as a photographer. 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 countryside gave him refuge during World War II, when he and other children were evacuated there from London during the Blitz.There’s a shadow that comes over my life when I think […] that I’ve earned my reputation out of other people’s downfall.

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 thing about mythology is that it’s heavily overloaded; most stories over time have been packed with embellishment.

Because the light is pouring in here and it’s as if I’m being invited to go out there and pick up on it. The Stillness of Life’ includes never-before-seen Arctic landscapes captured by McCullin in 2019 during a trip to Svalbard. Nobody knows how long it has been there; some dew ponds date back to prehistoric times, and it’s tempting to think that this one served the Bronze Age hill-fort that overlooks the site. McCullin’s photos helped create the visual language of suffering that pervades media culture in our own century, from humanitarian appeals to modern-day refugee crises. The physical landscapes are not usually awesome in themselves but McCullin's treatment makes them inspiring subjects for us to enjoy.