Don McCullin: Journeys across Roman Asia Minor

Don McCullin, Barnaby Rogerson, William Dalrymple

From Shelf: Favourite books I read in 2023

Don McCullin's photographs explore the mountains, valleys and coast of western Turkey, hunting out the most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. His work offers 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.

'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.