Palmyra, says Don McCullin, is a city he will never get out of his system. He’s haunted by the place, the most important ancient site in his imagination, and he has travelled to Syria to photograph Palmyra five times in the past 20 years. I have felt that too on my own three visits there. We are both possessed by the extraordinary mood of Palmyra, a pitiless blend of elegance and pathos. As ever, Don is outwardly a war photographer (making instinctive decisions in a split second of intuitive framing), but he is also, inwardly, an art historian locked into a dialogue with all the early photographers. Hence this article takes the form of a visual conversation between John Henry Haynes and Don at Palmyra, separated by little more than a century.

Don’s six journeys across Anatolia and the Levant had repeatedly criss-crossed with Haynes’s expeditions, most memorably at Assos on Turkey’s northern Aegean coast and at Ankara, but they came closest to each other at Palmyra. For Haynes, as he crossed the mudflats of Mesopotamia, the site must have loomed like a mirage, all the more incredible. He spent five days there in April 1885, camping in the lee of the Temple of Baalshamin and taking around two dozen photographs a day. He managed to capture a hundred images of Palmyra, yet left the ruins wanting just a few more days…