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.
