DON MCCULLIN

Hauser & Wirth is honoured to celebrate ‘Don McCullin. 90’ in the photographer’s home county of Somerset, marking his 90th year and coinciding with ‘Don McCullin. Broken Beauty’ at The Holburne Museum, Bath. This special presentation will span both the Bourgeois and Rhoades Galleries, including works featured in McCullin’s 2019 Tate Britain exhibition in London, alongside seminal images across his prolific seven-decade career. McCullin’s only self-portrait, taken in 1963 at Crowthers Reclamation Yard, Isleworth, will be exhibited for the first time in the UK.

Unlike McCullin’s widespread photojournalism, this focused curation is not anchored to a specific marker in recent history but instead provides an unbound homage to quieter moments within the everyday. McCullin conjures the power of transient and tender images caught on film, absorbing the crevices of life and glimpses of human connection. Throughout his career, McCullin has documented the beauty of daily existence that occurs within disparate locations, from areas of conflict to urban streets and visions of pastoral ideal. Time is extended and held in ‘Boys in the book of the prophet, Arbil, Kurdistan’ (1991) with the same emotional resonance captured in ‘Hessel Street Jewish District East End London’ (1962). Across the 90 works on view, McCullin balances intimacy and theatricality with humour and universal experiences of what it is to be alive in the world.

Having been evacuated to the safety of Somerset during the Blitz, McCullin has had a lifelong connection with the South West, continually seeking solace and repair amid the ancient landscape. Familiar works featured in the presentation explore local vistas within walking distance of the photographer’s home, including ‘The Dew Pond by Iron Age Hill Fort, Somerset’ (1988), shifting between the flooded lowlands of the Somerset levels to woodland streams, nearby monuments and historic hill forts. Rendered in richly tonal black and white, these painterly depictions of the English countryside—the place McCullin has described as his greatest refuge—offer an exquisitely personal and poignant meditation on solitude, memory and the longing for stillness.

The same meditative elegance extends to a selection of still life compositions, carefully composed by the photographer in his garden shed in between decades of global travel. McCullin often refers to these still lifes as providing a deeper form of escapism than his landscapes, drawing inspiration from the great Flemish and Dutch renaissance masters. It is the emotional durability and intuitive presence of McCullin throughout the entire journey of image making, from capturing to developing, that allows us a rare insight into the redemption he has found from the land and place he calls home.

McCullin’s desire to document and reflect on sacred locations continues across images of Roman statuary evolving from his Southern Frontiers series, a 25-year survey of the cultural and architectural remains of the Roman Empire. Imbued with both awe and unease, these images, like much of McCullin’s oeuvre, inhabit a space between beauty and brutality, evoking the psychological weight of history seen through the photographer’s unflinching eye and compassionate gaze. The Holburne Museum’s concurrent exhibition ‘Broken Beauty’ will extend this thread of McCullin’s practice with recent works of Roman sculptures captured in museums around the world. The images present sculptures as broken survivors of the classical world, offering a quiet solidity that is a counterbalance to the violence and chaos that McCullin has so famously documented since the 1950s.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.