Don McCullin, the renowned British photographer who spent decades documenting war and conflict around the world, is celebrating his 90th birthday with a new book showcasing his peaceful still life photography and landscapes from Somerset, England. The collection, titled "The Stillness of Life," represents a dramatic shift from his earlier work capturing carnage and human suffering to intimate arrangements of flowers, fruit, and everyday objects in his rural home.
McCullin's connection to Somerset dates back to his childhood during World War II. He recently recalled taking a slow train to London that stopped at Frome station, triggering memories from 85 years ago when he was a confused five-year-old evacuee. "It is 1940 and I'm a confused child of five, stepping out onto Frome's platform holding a gas mask in one hand, and the hand of my little sister in the other. We were in a group of evacuees sent to the countryside to escape the London bombings," McCullin remembered.
The photographer never forgot the beautiful Somerset countryside, and decades later, while working for the Sunday Times, an editor told him about a village house for sale in the area. McCullin jumped at the opportunity to purchase the 18th-century cottage. "The moment I walked into this 18th-century cottage and heard the rush of a stream below, I knew I'd found the place where I belonged," he explained. "Over the years going to various wars, this corner of Somerset has saved and restored my sanity and given me a sense of balance, just witnessing the change of the seasons and soaking up the enduring peace and silence of the land."
Since the early 1980s, McCullin has been creating elaborate still life arrangements in his garden shed at home in Somerset. Each composition has been carefully constructed using natural elements like cut flowers including lilies, foxgloves, and gladioli, along with fruit and fungi. These organic materials are often presented alongside cherished mementos from his travels, such as a bronze dragon from Asia, vases found in junk shops, and Hindu goddess figurines.
Inspired by 16th-century Dutch master painters, McCullin has worked to recreate similar artistic vision through photography. "In autumn, I liked to glean the hedgerows and scour the fields for berries, mushrooms and wild flowers which I'd arrange, altar-like, around favorite mementos of my travels, like my Asian bronzes," he explained. "Inspired by the 16th century masters of Dutch still lifes, I tried to create a similar canvas with the photographic image. In a derelict shed in my garden, using soot from the chimney, I stippled the cracking walls to simulate the patina of age and create a tableau observed in the half-light of a grimy window."
The new book includes landscapes gathered throughout McCullin's entire career, spanning from early photographs of England's industrial north to images from India, Africa, and more recent shots taken closer to his Somerset home. Many of these landscape photographs are shot to enhance metallic light, lowering skies, and bare trees, often creating a sense of foreboding and desolation that seems to contemplate the aftermath of battle scenes.
McCullin maintains his focus on texture in both his still life compositions and landscape photography, highlighting the delicate nature of flower petals, the smooth wood of statues, and the stark contrast between water and mud. In these traditional artistic genres, McCullin's contemporary vision brings new life and beauty to everyday subjects. His expanses of desert sand suggest vast eternities, while his silver-edged cloudscapes evoke biblical drama. Any human figures appearing in the frame are incidental and merely contribute to the overall composition, representing a significant departure from the human-focused documentary work that originally made McCullin famous.
The photographer arranges disparate inanimate objects with fruits and flowers as a kind of shrine paying respect to the concept of transience versus permanence. These self-styled altars serve as homage to beauty, the changing seasons, and the fleeting passage of time. McCullin's ability to both capture and print compelling stories within each frame unites his still lifes and landscapes, demonstrating his mastery of lighting techniques that use shadows and minimal highlights to create dramatic depth and animate objects or create poetry within landscapes.
Now approaching 90, McCullin acknowledges the physical limitations that come with age. "Today, approaching my 90th year, it is almost impossible to be scampering over farm gates and barbed wire as I once liked to do in the dawns and desolation of winter, practicing patience in hostile weathers when the naked trees show their true character," he reflected. He also contemplates the end of his darkroom days, noting that "the deadly chemistry is too much" after seven decades of work.
"My photographic passion might be waning – the darkroom days are numbered, the deadly chemistry is too much," McCullin said. "I'm blessed after 70 years floating in that time capsule like an astronaut in space, suspended in the warm cocooning glow of the red light of what has been my life's main purpose and an extraordinary adventure." McCullin's first solo exhibition in New York, titled "Don McCullin: A Desecrated Serenity," is currently running at Hauser & Wirth New York through November 8th.
