Don McCullin: Journeys across Roman Asia Minor

‘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.

Table of Contents:
Foreword – William Dalrymple Introduction – Barnaby Rogerson Preface – Sir Donald McCullin Maps I. Ancient Art in Istanbul II. Pergamon III. Bergama Museum IV. The Troad V. Troy Museum VI. Aphrodisias VII. Aphrodisias Museum VIII. Sardis to Ephesus IX. Ephesus Archaeological Museum X. From Phrygia to the Lycian Shore XI. Antalya Museum XII. Pisidia XIII. Burdur Museum XIV. Pamphylia Achilles to Augustus: The Story of Asia Minor – Barnaby Rogerson The Stories behind the Pictures Acknowledgements Bibliography

About the Author :
Don McCullin, the world-renowned photojournalist, has said, 'Photography has given me a life.' Compassion is at the heart of his work. Shot and badly wounded in Cambodia, he has been imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. He has braved bullets and bombs, not only in search of the perfect shot, but to help dying soldiers and wounded civilians. 'The very least I could do was try and articulate these stories with the compassion they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster.' In 1993 he was awarded a CBE, later capped by a knighthood and a solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Barnaby Rogerson accompanied Don McCullin on his three Turkish expeditions through Anatolia, which he described in a series for Cornucopia magazine. As a young man he compiled half a dozen guidebooks to North Africa and the Levant - a useful apprenticeship to writing narrative history books charged with a sense of place. As the publisher of Eland Books, he is dedicated to keeping classic travel books in print.