Twenty-five years ago, Don McCullin embarked on a journey to create a cultural and architectural survey of the remains of the Roman Empire. The photographs in his forthcoming book—The Roman Conceit—focus on the marble sculptures of the heroes of antiquity preserved in museums in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Turkey, United Kingdom and the USA. McCullin has turned his attention from a fascination with the ruined cities of the Empire—exposed in big, broad landscapes under metallic skies—to the still and intimate close-ups of stone sculpture. For this collection, McCullin photographed after-hours, or before doors open to the public, in the museums. The statues, released from their context—time and place—are captured in black and white and in the hush and tranquillity of a space devoid of crowds. They are re-animated by McCullin’s gaze and through his lens. ‘It is never as an academic, nor as a scholar, that I respond to these stone gods and goddesses, but as a respectful admirer. I hope to pay tribute, through my photography, to their iconic beauty, their marble perfection and their very existence, exhumed lovingly by archaeologists and brought to life after 2000 years of burial. We must not allow ourselves to forget that such beauty came at a price; this, after all was stone quarried by enslaved people and the statuary itself became the spoils of war, looted across the centuries, from country to country, to this day. It moves me that these exhibits have existed through such turbulent times and turmoil; surviving disfigurement and the changing mores and morality of Christianity and Islam which found nudity unsettling, surviving the vandalism of thieves and tomb-robbers, the destruction of earthquakes, as well the zeal of over-enthusiastic restorers. Their broken beauty doesn’t take away from their impact; here is all the power and the
glory of the Roman world at its most narcissistic and idealised; a celebration of victory, grandeur and perfection of the gods and heroes of the classical world.‘–Don McCullin
