Curated by Simon Baker, director of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, in close collaboration with Don McCullin and Tim Jefferies, Hamiltons Gallery, London; with the assistance of Catherine Fairweather and Jeanne Grouet

 

Exhibition promoted by Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale e Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

Produced and organized by da Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

The McCullin exhibition at Palazzo Esposizioni represents an ideal extension and enrichment of the retrospective shown at Tate Britain in 2019 and curated by Simon Baker. Besides retracing the most significant moments of the great photographer’s career, the show features a series of photographs dedicated to the Roman Empire that McCullin started taking in the early 2000s and still regards as the culmination of his years of work. In fact, in this series all his pivotal themes seem to overlap and merge together: the pain depicted in images of subaltern England, the pain of various wars scattered across the world and the peace of the Somerset landscape where McCullin has sought refuge from the suffering of his war experiences. Thus, in the current exhibition, pain and peace coexist in a cultural, architectural, and historical photographic exploration of the ruins from the Roman Empire in the southern Mediterranean region.

Renowned for his daring, frank, but always emotionally engaging approach across a range of subjects, McCullin has produced some of the most immediately recognisable images of poverty, famine and war in the history of photography, as well as documenting landscapes both at home and abroad, with the style and passion that marks out all of his work.
The exhibition of over 200 photographs printed by McCullin himself, will be arranged in six distinct exhibition spaces, with one entire gallery dedicated to each of the following groups of work: Early Work in London and Berlin; War Photographs; Documentary Practice in the United Kingdom (Bradford, Liverpool and the North of England); International Documentary and Travel; British Landscapes and Still Life; The Roman Empire (Architecture and Antiquity).