In the past, he has described the poverty he photographed in England as a ‘social war’, and to him the war is ongoing. In October, Jonathan Cape is proud to publish The Landscape - the last in a long series of books, which encompasses the entirety of McCullin's working life.

His photography engages the energy of the land—its history, character and expression—documenting it on film and paper.

They are things that neither glossy magazines during the heyday of print journalism nor the accolades showered on him by the British establishment can quite contain. This driving force to connect and reflect on sacred locations and diverse communities continues further afield across to India and Indonesia, where McCullin has documented local rituals, festivals and architecture. McCullin’s photos helped create the visual language of suffering that pervades media culture in our own century, from humanitarian appeals to modern-day refugee crises.

Often referring to the British countryside as his greatest salvation, McCullin demonstrates the full mastery of his medium with stark black and white images resonating with human emotion.His ominous skies and ever-present water – ponds, rivers, saturated fields, the flooded Somerset Levels – hint at the destructive power of our climate, too. The copy in near fine condition has some slight toning to extremities of pages and a minor soft bump to top right corner of front cover. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

The room is packed from floor to ceiling with archive boxes of prints and negatives whose labels say things like ‘Cambodia’, ‘Beatles’ and ‘Not too bad’. The imagery of his home county, ravaged by storms, inevitably projects the associations of a battlefield, or, at least, the views of one intimate with scenes of war. And although the majority of the images featured are from Great Britain, it also includes stunning scenes from Syria, Iraq, France, Morocco, Sudan, India and Indonesia. The years of dodging bullets and photographing subjects on the move trained his eye to be quick, but this slower work hinges more on patience.

For more than 30 years, whenever he has had the time, he has walked up the hill and stood there with his camera waiting for the right moment to take a photograph. The Landscape ] comes as a timely reminder of the photographer’s darkness of touch … the large-scale pictures take the reader with McCullin on a landscape journey both at home and abroad.