Stuart Franklin – human footprints -

At a time of strenuous worldwide efforts to protect our climate and of palpable changes in nature, the works of Stuart Franklin, who was born in London in 1956, are touching a nerve.

Franklin studied photography at the West Surrey College of Art and Design and subsequently started work for the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine.
As a member of Agence Presse Sygma in Paris (1980 to 1985), he expanded his knowledge and continued his fascination with the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Since 1989, Stuart Franklin has been a member of the world-famous photographic agency Magnum, and was its elected president from 2006 to 2009.

At the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Stuart Franklin created a photographic icon with his world-famous photograph of a demonstrator stopping a column of tanks. This image now stands as a symbol for this incident and as a metaphor for nonviolent resistance.
Subsequently, Franklin decided to work more extensively for magazines and between 1990 and 2004, created some 20 photographic documentaries for National Geographic.
Driven by his commitment to and interest in ecology and nature, he completed a PhD in geography at Oxford University in 2002 in order to gain a better theoretical understanding for his work.
He succeeds like few others in documenting the landscape as a snapshot of change. The subtle aesthetics of his landscape portraits reveal both the uniqueness and the fragility of nature; in the disturbingly beautiful detail of the landscape itself, and in the contamination of nature through the remnants of human activity and intervention. In his photographs, natural and unnatural processes become apparent. This work resulted in his topical book "Footprints - Our Landscape in Flux" (Thames & Hudson, 2008).

- 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).