Don McCullin’s painterly still life photographs

Now in his 90^th year, British photographer Don McCullin has just released The Stillness of Life (GOST Books), a hypnotic collection of landscape and still life photographs that evoke the sublime mystery of existence itself. The landscapes are drawn from personal work and images from his storied career, while the still lifes come from a practice that began during the early 1980s when the photographer began staging scenes in a derelict garden shed of his Somerset home in southwest England. 

“Somerset is associated with cider drinkers, great cheese and the annual Glastonbury Festival. However, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful region and one of the places in the UK where you can sense the ancient which came before,” says Stuart Smith, Director of Gost Books. ​“There is evidence of life from Palaeolithic times in areas of Somerset, and a sense of timelessness pervades. You can feel the presence of those who walked before in the unchanged landscape.” 

McCullin first saw Somerset as a child in the autumn of 1940 at just five years old, when he disembarked from the train at Frome Station with a gas mask in one hand, his little sister’s in the other. His mother sent them from north London to escape the Blitz. Over the next two years, he sheltered from the war in a farm labourer’s cottage in Norton Saint Phillip. His sister resided in the same town, a world away at the manor and adopted by the family, never to return to their tenement flat. 

• Read next: The world through the eyes of war photographer Don McCullin

McCullin could never forget the idyllic landscape of his youth and returned to its Edenic splendour when the opportunity to purchase a village house arose. ​“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,” he writes in a crisp artist’s statement. 

McCullin weaves elegiac panoramas of the English landscape, with eerie scenes of industrial destruction in the North, evoking the spirit of Renaissance painters like Hieronymous Bosch, who paired scenes of Eden with the Last Judgment. In between lies a garden of earthly delights – images made in India, Egypt, Kenya, and Türkiye, where time stretches back to the furthest reaches of memory. Here, amidst the ruins, life begins anew. 

The still life images are gentle altars that suggest the peaceful coexistence of humanity in the natural world – an increasingly disappearing proposition as climate collapse unfurls. Created to honour the ever-changing seasons and mark the passage of time, McCullin crafts elegant arrangements of fresh flowers and sacred objects, the photograph becoming a memento mori of the world we once knew. 

• Read next: Hopelessness In Focus: Northern England’s 1980s industrial decline

“Somerset has always been a place of escape,” Smith says. ​“It became a refuge from the cruelty of man and that provided solace from the futility and waste of war. Perhaps the landscape was a reminder that there will still be beauty somewhere in the world, and dawn will always come.”

The Stillness of Life by Don McCullin is published by GOST Books.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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