The Stillness of Life is a book of still life photographs and landscapes by Sir Don McCullin, the majority of which are previously unpublished. The publication coincides with the photographer's 90th birthday and offers a contemplative and meditative review of his work spanning decades. McCullin has been creating still life arrangements in his garden shed at home in Somerset since the early 1980s. Each still life has been lyrically constructed with the natural—cut flowers such as lilies, foxgloves and gladioli, fruit or fungi—often presented alongside beloved mementos of his travels: a bronze dragon from the orient, a junk-shop vase, a Hindu goddess. He arranges disparate inanimate objects with fruits and flowers as a kind of shrine, to pay respect to the idea of transience versus permanence; these self-styled altars act as a homage to beauty, to the changing seasons and the fleeting passage of time. McCullin also maintains focus on texture in both genres—the delicacy of flower petals or the smooth wood of a statue in a still life, and the contrast of water and mud in his landscapes. In these traditional genres, his contemporary vision breathes new life and beauty into the everyday.