For Catherine Fairweather, a trip to Sardinia with her husband, the photographer Don McCullin, inspires reflections on their long relationship, sustained by a shared passion for adventure and a ceaseless urge to roam
FARO CAPO SPARTIVENTO, AN 18TH-CENTURY WORKING LIGHTHOUSE restored and converted into an expensive hotel, sits high above the galloping surf of a wild promontory on the southernmost tip of Sardinia. It is billed, promisingly, as ‘the architecture of light’, in the place ‘where the wind was born’.
‘It feels like somewhere our professional travelling days might also reach their end,’ says my husband, the photographer Don McCullin, who is prone to making apocalyptic statements and has been predicting his own imminent demise – away of touching wood – for as long as I have known him. But the grand old man of photoreportage is now less willing than he once was to follow my editorial directives for glossy and glamorous travel photography. It doesn’t square with his own nostalgie de la boue – apredilection for uncovering the painful and edgy side of life. If this is to be a finale, the place couldn’t be more photogenic; too much so, as far as Don is concerned. He doesn’t snap airbrushed holidays, sunsets, children or pets.
It is one of the more spoiling stops on a working trip that has Don headlining the Photo Solstice festival in Cagliari, a precursor to a major retrospective at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, which opens in October, coinciding with his 88th birthday.
As always, upon arrival in a new place, and especially now that he is finally feeling his years – for so long, he did seem ageless – my husband’s first port of call is his pillow. He sleeps his way into a place. This is his way of settling. I, on the other hand, am desperate to explore the parameters of this coastline on foot. Siestas, moreover, conjure the long, hot Athenian Riviera summers of my childhood: golden, except when the dreaded afternoon hush would descend on my grandparents’ shuttered villa. Those hours of enforced quiet and rest seemed like a waiting-room to death.
So, I shoulder my basket, packed with a towel, snorkel and fins, and take off across the rough juniper-scented headland, where you can walk freely across the undeveloped 500 hectares, thanks to the area’s protected status as strategic naval territory. Tripping down steep pathways to the sea, I ponder our unusual dynamic as a travelling duo and professional couple: how Don is able to be as still and patient as a standing stone, waiting for the right light to strike. He reminds me, actually, of the dolmens, the ancient henge structures that punctuate the Sardinian hinterland, prehistoric megaliths boring deep into the earth. That rock-solid
