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RETOLD: Temples of Stone 

February 21, 2018 
by Stuart Franklin 
Earlier this year, photographer Stuart Franklin travelled to Egypt and Morocco, inspired by the North African journey made by Magnum founder George Rodger, 60 years previously across the Sahara Desert. In the spirit of Rodger, Franklin viewed the landscape through his geographer’s eye, comparing the natural and honed stone he encountered in the monumental landscape.

“George Rodger’s tremendous contribution to Magnum and his travels in North Africa were the starting point for this series of photographs. George Rodger loved the desert, Africa, the open road, the unexplored in landscape, and people untouched by modernity. This last feature has gone, but I found the rest much as he’d left them in the 1950s.

Starting points are wonderful opportunities for photographers and artists. A path has been cleared, but the road is unmade. This allows for the creative possibility to build something new. I’ve always been interested in landscape and especially the interface between nature and society. The joy is in the way everything overlaps: weathered statues and rock buttresses, human and natural forms, each chiselled out of the desert and stone outcrops in a union of dream world archaeology. This eventually
became the focus, the road ahead for me. It led to this project and tribute to George Rodger.” - Stuart Franklin

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