Don McCullin review shattered stone heads and severed limbs echo the horrors he saw in war

"McCullin's latest exhibition, Broken Beauty at the Holburne Museum in Bath, begins with four recent pictures of ruined Roman sculptures. These images the white ruins photographed against black backgrounds so they float are reminiscent at first of museum postcards, representations of representations that refer to ancient history and myths of fatal ambition, desire and domination. There's a crouching Venus, her arms missing and head half-shattered."

"A homeless man sleeps standing up McCullin is drawn to these liminal states McCullin seems to search for continuity in these sculptures, an acknowledgment that we've always been like this and always will be. And perhaps also, they are a justification for his own role, in representing it, something he has devoted his life to. Will his images of horror have the same kind of beauty, with the distance of centuries?"

"McCullin stopped going to wars in the mid-1980s. He has since photographed landscapes in Somerset, where he lives, looking for solace and healing. But his pictures of the countryside are hardly anodyne: he makes a pond look like a pool of blood, spindly trees scratching the sky like torn limbs. His moribund visions turn open spaces into oppressive, brooding environments stalked by ghosts."

Don McCullin witnessed major conflicts and disasters for decades and is now 90. Broken Beauty at the Holburne Museum in Bath opens with recent pictures of ruined Roman sculptures photographed as white ruins against black backgrounds. The images include a crouching Venus, a hermaphrodite and satyr, a headless Amazon and the emperor Commodus, evoking collapse, fatal ambition and the fragility of ideals. A homeless man sleeping standing up highlights liminal states and continuity of human condition. McCullin stopped covering wars in the mid-1980s and now photographs Somerset landscapes, but his countryside images remain dark, oppressive and brooding.

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