Stuart Franklin

Stuart Franklin was born in Britain in 1956. He studied photography and film at West Surrey College of Art and Design and geography at the University of Oxford (BA and PhD). During the 1980s, he worked as a correspondent for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris before joining Magnum Photos in 1985, where he became a full member four years later.

Franklin’s coverage of the Sahel famine from 1984 to 1985 won him acclaim, but he is perhaps best known for his celebrated photograph of a man defying a tank in Tiananmen Square, China in 1989, which won him a World Press Photo Award. Since 1990, Franklin has completed over 20 assignments for National Geographic. His documentary photography has taken him to Central and South America, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Since 2004, he has focused on long-term projects concerned primarily with man and the environment.

In 1999, he produced The Time of Trees, a photographic essay examining the social relationship between nature and society through the prism of trees. This was followed four years later by The Dynamic City, about the evolution and everyday life of cities. In 2005, he completed Hôtel Afrique, an exhibition on Africa’s elite0 hotels (the book of the same title was published in 2007). Also in 2005, aided by a grant funded by the National Trust, he published Sea Fever, a documentary project about the British coastline.

In 2008, Franklin worked on landscape projects in Europe: Footprint: Europe’s Changing Landscape (published 2008), focusing on climate change, which was followed by a parallel commission and acquisition from the National Galleries of Scotland. Between 2009 and now, Franklin has completed a trilogy of projects on nature and memory, published by Hatje Cantz. Beginning in Norway, Narcissus (2013), the book and exhibition, was followed by Analogies (2019), and concluded with the book, Traces, published in 2023. Franklin has also taken time out to teach and write on photography: The Documentary Impulse (2016) was followed by Ambiguity Revisited: Communicating with Pictures (2020).