Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Arthur Lubow

Diane Arbus was one of the greatest photographers of the last century. Her portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level. Her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. 
 
She was born into a Russian-Jewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons. Richard Avedon later championed Arbus’s work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world. Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments. Lubow’s biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition. The book ends with her death. The entire narrative is a slow march towards that event.

Diane Arbus

Don McCullin

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Contains 40 new unpublished photographs and a new introduction — the definitive edition.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.

The New Definitive Edition

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.

In England

Antony Gormley

Over a period of 100 days from July to October 2009, 2,400 people stood on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square for one hour. They were free to do as they chose during this period in the spotlight. Nobody could predict what would happen or the scale of the response. Many thousands applied for the 2,400 slots and candidates were selected randomly. Millions watched the events as they were all filmed and available online. Hundreds of thousands continued to turn to the website long after the project itself was finished. The event was a phenomenon, which we are grappling to understand. The entire enterprise was the conceived by Antony Gormley, and can be seen as a further example of the artist's ability to tap into the public consciousness. 
 
The book will contain studio portraits of all the 'plinthers' prior to their appearance. Photographs will be drawn from innumerable sources. The whole event has been remarkably photographed by Clare Richardson and the final edit will be drawn from a selection of 600 of her pictures of 'plinthers and public by day and night. Lee Hall will be writing a text about the importance of the square itself as a location. Essays will be included from Hans Ulrich Obrist, the art historian, as well as by both an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst. All the 'plinthers' were subject to extensive interviews set up by an oral history expert and their voices will contribute to the creation of a book that is more than a document. The aim is to capture the emotional intensity and the personally transformative effect that was created by one of the most extraordinary works of public art in our time.

One and Other

'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.

The Landscape

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.

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