The New Definitive Edition

Don McCullin

The updated retrospective published for McCullin's 80th birthday. 
 
Contains 40 new unpublished photographs and a new introduction — the definitive edition.

Sir Don McCullin grew up in north London. He worked for the Sunday Times for eighteen years and covered every major conflict in his adult lifetime until the Falklands War. The finest British photojournalist of his generation, he has received many honours and awards including the CBE. He received a knighthood in the 2017 New Year honours list. He lives in Somerset.

The updated retrospective published for McCullin's 80th birthday. 
 
Contains 40 new unpublished photographs and a new introduction — the definitive edition. 
 
McCullin’s reputation has long been established as one of the greatest photographers of conflict in the last century. In the fourteen years since the first publication of the book, McCullin has shed the role of war photographer and become a great landscape artist. He has also travelled widely through Africa, India, the Middle East and among the tribes living in Stone Age conditions in Indonesia. His journey from the back streets of north London to his rural retreat in the depths of Somerset is unparalleled. It includes a passage through the most terrible scenes of recent history, for which his stark views of the West Country offer him some redemption.

Shaped By War

A remarkable visual document of war and warfare, Shaped by War presents the narrative of McCullin’s life, including pictures of McCullin in the field and key photographs from his career.

No other photographer in modern times has recorded war and its aftermath as widely and unsparingly as Don McCullin. After a childhood in London during the Blitz, and after the hardships of evacuation, McCullin feels his life has indeed been shaped by war. 
 
From the building of the Berlin Wall at the height of the Cold War to El Salvador and Kurdistan, McCullin has covered the major conflicts of the last fifty years, with the notable exception of the Falklands, for which he was denied access. His pictures from the Citadel in Hue and in the ruins of Beirut are among the most unflinching records of modern war. The publication of many of his greatest stories in the Sunday Times magazine did much to raise the consciousness of a generation, even if he himself now fears that photographs cannot prevent history from repeating itself. The brutality of conflict returns over and over again. McCullin here voices his despair. 
 
McCullin recounts the course of his professional life in a series of devastating texts on war, the events and the power of photography. The conclusion of the book marks McCullin’s retreat to the Somerset landscape surrounding his home, where the dark skies over England remind him yet again of images of war. Despite the sense of belonging and even contentment, for him there is no final escape.

In England

Don McCullin's In England returns to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer, combining his greatest work with previously unpublished photographs.

An emotional record of a homeland that is contradictory, eccentric and still riven with the stain of class division…. [McCullin] is motivated by beauty and the power of single image to tell a story.

Don McCullin's view of England is rooted in his wartime childhood and growing up around Finsbury Park in the fifties. His first published photograph was a picture of a gang from his neighbourhood, which appeared in a newspaper after a local murder; McCullin always balanced his anger at the unacceptable face of the nation with tenderness or compassion. 
 
In England combines some of his greatest work with an entirely new body of photographs. McCullin sees his home country with its perpetual social gulf between the affluent and the desperate in mind. He continues in the same black and white tradition as he did between foreign assignments for the Sunday Times in the sixties and seventies, when his view of a deprived Britain seemed as dark as the conflict zones from which he'd just escaped. 
 
This book marks his return to the cities and landscape he knew as a young photographer. At a time when we might believe the world has changed beyond our imagination, McCullin shows us a view of England where the line between the wealthy and the deprived is as defined as ever. This time he adds wry humour to his lyricism, as if the nation is as absurd as it is tragic.

An Autobiography

Unreasonable Behaviour

'McCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about.' - Times Literary Supplement

He has known all forms of fear, he's an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experience in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man - like myself, as a matter of fact - for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he is testing his Maker's indulgence.

If this was just a book of McCullin's war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more.

From the opening...there is hardly a dull sentence: his prose is so lively and uninhibited... An excellent book.

If anyone is the living embodiment of the power of a photo, it is Don McCullin.

This is a great book not just for those with an interest in photography, but also for those with an interest in modern history.

The story of [McCullin’s] life and work is recounted here in modest yet thrilling prose alongside some of his most iconic images.

Harrowing as sections of McCullin’s work can be, his story makes fascinating reading.

McCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about

From the opening...there is hardly a dull sentence: his prose is so lively and uninhibited... An excellent book

If this was just a book of McCullin's war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more

McCullin...handles much of the material culled from his war experiences like a seasoned thriller writer. His dialogue is convincing and sharp

Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework... A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict

'He has known all forms of fear, he's an expert in it. He has come back from God knows how many brinks, all different. His experience in a Ugandan prison alone would be enough to unhinge another man - like myself, as a matter of fact - for good. He has been forfeit more times than he can remember, he says. But he is not bragging. Talking this way about death and risk, he seems to be implying quite consciously that by testing his luck each time, he is testing his Maker's indulgence' - John le Carre 
 
'McCullin is required reading if you want to know what real journalism is all about' - The Times 
 
'From the opening...there is hardly a dull sentence: his prose is so lively and uninhibited... An excellent book' - Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Unsparing reminiscences that effectively combine the bittersweet life of a world-class photojournalist with a generous selection of his haunting lifework... A genuinely affecting memoir that reckons the cost and loss involved in making one's way on the cutting edge of conflict' - Kirkus Reviews 
 
'If this was just a book of McCullin's war photographs it would be valuable enough. But it is much more' - Sunday Correspondent

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

[The Landscape] comes as a timely reminder of the photographer’s darkness of touch… the large-scale pictures take the reader with McCullin on a landscape journey both at home and abroad.

The veteran war photographer [Don McCullin] has turned his lens to more peaceful scenes... for his latest book, The Landscape. The images carry a dramatic feel and a preference for stormy skies that reveal an intimacy with conflict and destruction.

Don McCullin's spot in the pantheon of great photographers was assured decades ago, yet he still produces images that stop a dead person in their tracks. This new collection mixes recent with past work, showing how no one has ever been able to accuse McCullin of wielding a frivolous camera.

McCullin… succeeds in making the art of composition seem effortless on page after page.

Possibly Britain’s greatest living photographer.

'The veteran war photographer [Don McCullin] has turned his lens to more peaceful scenes... for his latest book, The Landscape. The images carry a dramatic feel and a preference for stormy skies that reveal an intimacy with conflict and destruction.' 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. McCullin’s pastoral view is far from idyllic. Though the woods and stream close to his house in Somerset have offered some respite, he has not sought out the quiet corners of rural England. He is drawn, instead, to the drama of approaching storms. He has an acute sense of how the emptiness of his immediate landscape echoes a wider tone of disquiet. 
 
McCullin is based in the geographical centre of southern England. The presence of sacred mounds, hill forts, ancient roads and the nearby monuments of the prehistoric era have shaped his sense of nationhood. But down on the Somerset Levels, he has tramped through the flooded lowlands. The imagery of his home county, ravaged by storms, inevitably projects the associations of a battlefield, or, at least, the views of one intimate with scenes of war. 
 
He is not alone in his preference for darkened clouds over clear skies. McCullin’s West Country is not far removed from the East Anglia of Constable’s Dedham Vale two centuries earlier. His knowledge of his historical predecessors places him deep in a Romantic tradition. His experience as a traveller reinforces the sense of a man on the edge of civilisation under siege. 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 Landscape is the last in a long series of books published by Jonathan Cape, which encompasses the entirety of McCullin’s working life.

Don McCullin

Praise for The Landscape

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Wherever they are shot, McCullin’s landscapes – handsomely reproduced on these pages – share an inky dark magnificence, and an unsettling sense of menace.

Books by Don McCullin

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