About the Book:

Sir Donald McCullin’s Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is driven by an eye for beauty and an ear for history. 

Don’s obsession with the Roman Empire was kick-started when as a young photographer he was sent on a dangerous journalistic mission to Marseille and North Africa with the writer Bruce Chatwin. Over the past twenty years Don has travelled from Hadrian’s Wall to Roman frontier forts in the Libyan Sahara, from oasis cities on the frontiers of Arabia to the last palaces of the Caesars.

Recently, while most of us were sheltering from Covid, he has explored the mountains, valleys and coast of western Anatolia, hunting out the most poignant and powerful ruins of the Roman Empire. Creating a meditation on landscape, the effects of light on ancient stone, and the way clouds animate the past. His book is also, however, inescapably about conquest, imperium, and power.

 While a few of the plates here started life as digital images, Don insists on developing his rolls of black-and-white film in his studio by hand. He shows us pavements once trodden by Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Caesar, St Paul and the Emperor Hadrian. Through his lens we view ancient theatres cascading down the slopes of mountains, 2,000-year-old bridges used by hill farmers, and find spring water flowing into fountains still dominated by statues of the gods. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor shows us a world still packed full of wonder.

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.

Details:

35 x 30 cm, 288 pages

For more information, email books@heywoodhill.com.