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.

Don McCullin is one of the worlds greatest living photographers. Few have enjoyed a career so long; none one of such variety and critical acclaim. For the past 50 years he has proved himself a photojournalist without equal, whether documenting the poverty of London's East End, or the horrors of wars in Africa, Asia or the Middle East. Simultaneously he has proved an adroit artist capable of beautifully arranged still lifes, soulful portraits and moving landscapes. In 1993 he was the first British photojournalist to be awarded a CBE. This first would be capped by a knighthood and then by a solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

Don was born in 1935. He survived an impoverished north London childhood further blighted by Hitler's bombs and evacuation. The early death of his father, meant the end of any hopes of further education. Young McCullin was called up for National Service with the RAF. After postings to Egypt, Kenya and Cyprus he returned to London armed with a twin reflex Rolleicord camera and began photographing friends from a local gang named The Guv'nors. Persuaded to show them to the picture editor at the Observer in 1959, aged 23, he earned his first commission and began his long and distinguished career in photography more by accident than design.

In 1961 he won the British Press Award for his essay on the construction of the Berlin Wall. His first taste of war came in Cyprus, 1964, where he covered the armed eruption of ethnic and nationalistic tension, winning a World Press Photo Award for his efforts. For the next two decades war became a mainstay of Don's journalism, initially for the Observer and, from 1966, for The Sunday Times. In the Congo, Biafra, Uganda, Chad, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland and more, he time and again combined a mastery of light and composition with an unerring sense of where a story was headed, and a bravery that pushed luck to its outermost limits.

"Photography has given me a life... The very least I could do was try and articulate these stories with as much compassion and clarity as they deserve, with as loud a voice as I could muster. Anything less would be mercenary."

He has been shot and badly wounded in Cambodia, imprisoned in Uganda, expelled from Vietnam and had a bounty on his head in Lebanon. What's more, he has braved bullets and bombs not only to get the perfect shot but to help dying soldiers and wounded civilians. Compassion is at the heart of all his photography.

Away from war Don's work has often focused on the suffering of the poor and underprivileged and he has produced moving essays on the homeless of London's East End and the working classes of Britain's industrialized cities.

"I had long been uncomfortable with my label of war photographer, which suggested an almost exclusive interest in the suffering of other people. I knew I was capable of another voice."

From the early 1980s increasingly he focused his foreign adventures on more peaceful matters. He traveled extensively through Indonesia, India and Africa returning with powerful essays on places and people that, in some cases, had few if any previous encounters with the Western world. In 2010 he published Southern Frontiers, a dark and at-times menacing record of the Roman Empire's legacy in North Africa and the Middle East. His current project has been to record the presence of Rome in Asia Minor, published in a series of articles for Cornucopia magazine. This work has fueled the publication of Roman Roads: journeys through Asia Minor.

Barnaby Rogerson is a writer, publisher and television presenter. Barnaby has appeared on the BBC Life of Muhammad, Al Jazeera's Caliph and in many of Pilot productions, Muslim Empires series.

Barnaby was born in Scotland in 1960. Travel was a vital aspect of his childhood which followed in the wake of his father's career in the Royal Navy with postings to Gibraltar, Malta, Skye and Virginia. A degree in History from St Andrews University proved to be adequate preparation for work as a barman, tutor for a child star in a film made on a Greek island and a pony boy on a Highland estate. He worked for two independent publishers which led to a job in the press department of the Afghanistan Support Committee. A chance encounter in the Outer Hebrides led to his first commission to write a guidebook: Morocco (which went into six editions) was followed by Tunisia, Cyprus, Istanbul and Libya. Research for these guidebooks was partly funded by working as a lecturer, tour guide and journalist. A scrapbook of over three hundred articles (written for Cornucopia, TLS, Independent, Guardian, Telegraph and Country Life) has subsequently been pasted up on a website, Barnaby Rogerson.com

The birth of two daughters encouraged him to stay at home more often, so he wrote a History of North Africa, followed by a Biography of the Prophet Muhammad, then an account of the early Caliphate, The Heirs of the Prophet. The Last Crusaders (1415-1580) was an ambitious attempt to show how the Crusades against North Africa and the Ottoman Empire led to the emergence of the first colonial conquest states. This would be followed by In Search of Ancient North Africa, which tells the complex story of conquest and assimilation through six lives. He has just finished, A House Divided a book looking at conflict zones within the Middle East complicated by the Shia-Sunni schism within Islam.

Barnaby has also worked on a number of joint projects. He contributed the text for Don McCullin's photographic study of Roman North Africa and the Levant, Southern Frontiers, co-edited a collection of the contemporary travel writing Ox-Tales for the charity Oxfam, edited a collection of the travel literature of Marrakech, a collection of contemporary travel encounters with Islam; Meetings with Remarkable Muslims, a collection of English Orientalist verse, Desert Air, and a collection of the poetry of place of London. He has also put together a collection of the sacred numbers of the world, Rogerson's Book of Numbers.

Barnaby was on the advisory board of Critical Muslim, the editorial board of Middle East in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Royal Society of Asian Affairs. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a made an honorary member of The Travellers Club.

His day job is running Eland, a publishing house, which specializes in keeping classic travel books in print: www.travelbooks.co.uk

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuściński award-winning Return of a King. His most recent book, The Anarchy, was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019, and shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, the Tata Book of the Year (Non-fiction) and the Historical Writers Association Book Award 2020. It was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Bronze Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations.

A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, The Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect.

In 2022, Dalrymple launched his new Empire podcast, co-hosted with TV and radio presenter Anita Anand, exploring the stories, personalities and events of empire over the course of history. By 2023 it was being followed by more than 350,000 listeners.

Dalrymple lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi.