Journey 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

Sir Donald McCullin’s Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor is driven by an eye for beauty and an ear for history. On his 5,000-mile travels in western Turkey he works his ineffable magic, moving from a sanctuary known to Homer to the broken face of an exhausted Roman 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 this book is also inescapably about conquest, imperium and power. Journeys Across Roman Asia Minor reveals a world full of wonder. We see pavements once trodden by Aristotle and Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, St Paul and the Emperor Hadrian. Through his lens we discover ancient theatres cascading down the slopes of mountains, 2,000-year-old bridges used by hill farmers to this day, and spring water flowing into fountains still dominated by statues of the gods.