The Stillness of Life

McCullin’s has been creating still life arrangements in his garden shed at home in Somerset since the early 1980s.Each still life has been lyrically constructed with the natural—cut flowers (lilies, fox-gloves, gladioli), fruit or fungi—often presented alongside beloved mementos of his travels; a bronze dragon from the orient, a junk shop vase, a Hindu goddess. He arranges disparate inanimate objects with fruits and flowers as a kind of shrine to pay respect to the idea of transience versus permanence. These self-styled altars act as a homage to beauty, to the changing seasons and the fleeting passage of time. The landscapes in the book are gathered from throughout McCullin’s career—from early photographs of the Industrial North of the UK, to India, Africa and more recent images taken closer to home. Shot to enhance a metallic light, lowering skies and the denuded trees; there can be a sense of foreboding and desolation in the landscapes, as if the photographer were contemplating the aftermath of a battle scene. Vast eternities are suggested in his expanses of desert sand and biblical drama in his silver-edged cloudscapes. Any figures in the frame are incidental and merely contribute to the composition—a departure from the human-focused documentary work for which McCullin became known.