Don McCullin spent twenty-five years circling the remains of the Roman Empire, first photographing its ruined cities as wide landscapes under hard skies. This book turns the twenty-five-year project inward, toward marble. The statues gathered here—gods, heroes, and mortals of antiquity now held in museums across Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States—are pictured in black and white, made during the past three years, always before the doors open or after the last visitors leave. The book, published by GOST Books in 2025, contains 128 pages, sixty tritone images, and two foldouts in a hardback binding.

The quiet of those hours matters. Freed from the crowd and from the explanatory label, the figures lose some of their museum context and regain a kind of presence. McCullin has said he comes to them not as a scholar but as an admirer, and his close attention to surface, fracture, and light is that of a photographer who trusts the object more than the caption.

The sculptures carry a second history, and the book does not shy from it. The marble was quarried by enslaved people; the statuary was looted across centuries and borders; it survived iconoclasm, theft, earthquakes, and overeager restoration. McCullin acknowledges this in his own account, and Barnaby Rogerson, the historian and author credited with travelling with him and guiding the later stage of the work, returns the statues to procession, ritual, scent, and music—to the lives they once led rather than the alcoves they now occupy.

For readers, the interest lies in late McCullin turned to still, intimate subjects and in the collaboration with Rogerson, which shaped the later stage of the project. This is a long-gestated body of work, published in a form that gives the images and foldouts room to hold their silence.