Stuart Franklin

"Narcissus" documents the two-and-a-half-year period that London-based Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin (born 1956), known for his more political photojournalistic work, spent in a cabin in Norway. Shifting his lens away from familiar urban terrain, Franklin locates abundance in a seemingly austere landscape.

Narcissus

Mark Sealy

A rare glimpse of a fascinating aspect of life in Africa: the elite hotels which serve as an interface between the tribal, religious, social and cultural aspects of Africa and the global uniformity of international business culture. These are places where the unseen resources of Africa - diamonds, oil, minerals - are bartered away behind closed doors. But these are also places the local communities view as symbols of achievement, objects of desire: the dream venue for weddings. With photos by Magnum photographer Franklin and text by writer Sealy.

Hotel Afrique

These captivating landscapes by the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin provide a visual document of Europe in the midst of a growing environmental crisis.

Our Landscape in Flux

Footprint

Award-winning photographer Stuart Franklin's exploration of how we, as humans, are driven to visually document our experiences and the world around us. Stuart Franklin took one of the most powerful photographs of the twentieth century - the 'tank man' in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989. From his insightful position as a photographer, Franklin explores why we are driven to visually document our experiences and the world around us. He focuses on photography but traces this universal need through art, literature and science. Looking at photojournalism, war photography and work recording our culture, Franklin identifies some of its driving impulses: curiosity, outrage, reform and ritual; the search for evidence, for beauty, for therapy; and the immortalization of memory. As our understanding of 'documentary' continues to expand, Franklin considers photographic staging - where, perhaps, the future of the genre may lie: in search of truth over fact. "This book traces what I shall call the documentary impulse. Here I mean the passion to record, with fidelity, the moments we experience and wish to preserve, the things we witness and might want to reform; or simply the people, places or things we find remarkable... Photography (and journalism) practised respectfully has the power to educate us all towards a greater understanding and empathy towards others." —Stuart Franklin

The Documentary Impulse

ambiguity revisited is concerned with the manner in which pictures communicate with the spectator. Its focus lies in those fluid, indeterminate spaces where our reading of images, in art and photography, exercises and draws upon our imagination, memory, and experience. Sir William Empson's seminal (1930) text: Seven Types of Ambiguity is used as a springboard to discussion, towards a fresh way of exploring ambiguity beyond English literature, and in a broader framework to that contained in John Berger's (1989) Another Way of Telling. The use of ambiguity in art and photography, as in literature, is both a conscious and an unconscious act; and ambiguity influences the way in which we respond to work, from Leonardo da Vinci's portraits to the photographer William Eggleston's engaging and idiosyncratic reflections on America's Deep South. This ambiguity is a force for good, or at least one to be reckoned with, due to its participatory nature in actively engaging with, or masking itself from, the viewer. Ambiguity is infrequently discussed but is highly relevant as an expressive device. It holds a position at the core of communication within the visual arts. As society becomes influenced increasingly by communications delivered in a visual form, so we, the consumers, require tools, more than ever, to engage with the work.

Stuart Franklin

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