Exclusive: The work will feature some of the photographer’s most powerful images from his 70-year career

After more than seven decades of covering conflicts around the world, Don McCullin will return to Vietnam and his best-known images for his final book.

The photographer, who got his start aged 23 when his image of a gang in Finsbury Park was published in the Observer, has decided to revisit the war and his 12-day stint with US marines during the battle of Hue in 1968.

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.

Holburne museum places renowned photographer’s pictures of ancient Roman statutes alongside his images of war and conflict

He is revered for his extraordinary black-and-white images documenting conflict, humanitarian crises and the tougher side of postwar Britain.

But an exhibition of work by photojournalist Sir Don McCullin opening this week at the Holburne museum in Bath focuses on a very different subject: Roman sculptures.

With a sharp eye and saturated colours, Parr’s photographs revealed the world in all its eccentric glory. Here, his friends, peers and collaborators pay tribute to a master

Grayson Perry, artist
I’ve never really been a fanboy, but the first time I saw Martin Parr I ran up and drunkenly hugged him. I said: “I love you Martin Parr!” I couldn’t help it. He was a hero of mine. And over the years he became my best artist friend.