Magnum Photos Photographer Profile

Stuart Franklin 

British, b. 1956 (Member) 

“ 
I love photographing. It's that simple. ” 

Biography 

Stuart Franklin was born in London in 1956. Having left school at 16, he went on to study photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design. His photographic career began when he started to work for the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph Magazine in London and later with Agence Presse Sygma in Paris.

During his time at Sygma (1980–85) he absorbed the skills of news photography, and also followed Henri Cartier-Bresson’s approach to photography; as he puts it, ‘curious, gentle, surreal with beautiful compositions – his work influenced just about everything I attempted.’ In his words, ‘At Sygma photographers arrived from Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon unloading their Domke bags and their stories. Later I felt confident enough to tell my own. I covered the 1983 Nigerian exodus, the Heysel Stadium disaster, the Beirut bombing of the French and American bases, the civil war there and in Sri Lanka, the conflict in Northern Ireland and finally the 1984–85 famine in Sudan.’

In Khartoum Stuart shared a flat with Sebastião Salgado for a few weeks. Salgado worked with Magnum Photos in Paris – founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, Robert Capa and George Rodger. Stuart was invited to join in the summer of 1985, and has been a full member since 1989, later serving as the agency’s elected president between 2006-2009.

It was during the course of 1989 that Stuart took his acclaimed photographs in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where a demonstration for freedom ended in a massacre. Thereafter he began to move away from news into magazine feature photography. Between 1990 and 2004 he photographed about twenty stories for National Geographic Magazine. During this time Stuart decided to pursue a better theoretical understanding of some of the issues he confronted, by embarking a period of academic study in 1997. He graduated with a first class degree in geography from Oxford University, and went on to complete his doctoral thesis there in 2002.

In 2005 he undertook the series of large-format photographs of Europe’s changing landscape that has led to his
book, Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux (Thames & Hudson, 2008).

During 2009 Stuart travelled to Mali and the Middle East. Stuart co-curating the Noorderlicht Photo Festival 2009 with an exhibition entitled “Point of No Return” on the continuing conflict in Gaza. In a change of approach to documentary, Stuart undertook a course of training at the UK’s National Film and Television School in observational documentary. Subsequently Stuart worked on his first long form documentary Runners, together with film work for ESPN.

During 2010 continued with the project: ‘Farmscapes’ supported and funded by the Scottish National Galleries. The work was first exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2012. During 2010-13 Stuart completed a long-term landscape project ‘Narcissus’, exhibited during in 2012/13 in Ålesund-Norway, Kristiansund - Norway, London, Paris and Edinburgh.

Stuart’s published books include:

The Time of Trees (Leonardo Arte, Milan, 1999)
La Città Dinamica (Mondadori, Milan, 2003),
Sea Fever (Bardwell Press, Oxford, 2005),
Hotel Afrique (Dewi Lewis, Manchester 2007)
Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux (Thames & Hudson, 2008)
Saint-Petersburg (Perlov Design, St Petersburg, 2012)
Narcissus (Hatje Cantz Verlag, Stuttgart, 2013).