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Don McCullin: Journeys across Roman Asia Minor
£85.70£90.30 (-5%)
‘Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures’ – Don McCullin Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is driven by an eye for beauty and an ear for history. It is an album of the most recent photographs taken by Don McCullin, informed by a life full of hard-won experience. Working the ineffable magic of a master-craftsman, he frames an ancient sanctuary known to Homer, then focuses on the broken face of an exhausted emperor, before turning his eye on the sensuous torso of a goddess. While most of us were sheltering from Covid, Don explored the mountains, valleys and coast of western Turkey, hunting out the most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. He has created a meditation on landscape, the effects of light on ancient stone, the way clouds animate the past, but it is also inescapably about past conflict. About conquest, about imperium, about power. Journeys across Roman Asia Minor shows us a world still packed full of enchantment and wonder. He shows us pavements once trodden by Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Caesar and Sulla, St Paul and Hadrian. Through his lens we view ancient theatres cascading down the slopes of mountains, two-thousand-year-old bridges still used by hill farmers, and find spring water flowing into fountains still dominated by statues of the gods.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Cornucopia Books (1 Sept. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 288 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0995756678 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0995756670 |
| Dimensions | 31.5 x 5.33 x 34.54 cm |
by J. D. Denness
I love looking through books of photographs and spending ages gazing at the detail that has been captured, I quite like photos of animals but they can feel a bit limited on what has been caught in that moment as the animal tends to dominate, for me it is the landscapes that are best and they don’t come much better than McCullin’s. Another preference of mine is black and white, this is another box ticked by McCullin.
McCullin is described at the beginning of this book as a master in black and white and that is spot on, just look at the cover for a great example, where there is a small patch of darkness between the almost overwhelming white of the stonework, you find your eye being drawn to the black. Every now and then (well most pages) McCullin presents the reader with a photo that takes your breath away, one of my favourites was the paved street to the Agora, the angle used draws you up the image to the top of the street, quite impressive to be able to transport the viewer to the location like that. The detail in the landscapes was magnificent, everything is in focus and every time I found myself starting on the horizon and working my way down to the main focus of the photo. There are also many photos taken within museums of statues and similar items and with the expert lighting used you can see an amazing amount of detail, those Roman artists were well talented. Using the darkest background possible and with all light focused on the stone you can almost see past any damage and see the original beauty in the artwork.
Barnaby Rogerson gives us an intro and goes into detail on the experience of travelling around Turkey looking for that moment to capture that perfect photo. From what was included I expect the toughest part was deciding which photos didn’t make the cut. This is a grand book and contains many photos which are almost as good as mine hehe.
This is a grand book that will beg to be read again and again and each time you’ll spot something you missed the first time around.