Holburne Museum, Bath
The feted photographer’s latest exhibition starts with images of ancient scultures depicting devotion and violence, before moving to war pictures and brooding Somerset landscapes

Few people have seen as much horror as Don McCullin. The feted photographer, now 90, witnessed major conflicts and disasters up close for decades. You can only imagine, through his widely published black and white pictures, how that might have affected him.

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 hermaphrodite struggles to get away from a lascivious satyr. A headless Amazon and the Roman emperor Commodus, known for his uninhibited cruelty, are fighting on horseback. Their pockmarked surfaces and broken limbs suggest the collapse of the great empires, the fragility of ideals that are obliterated by time, like marble.