Stuart Franklin

Stuart Franklin, born in London in 1956, studied photography and film at West Surrey College of Art and Design and painting and drawing under Leonard McComb. Later Franklin went on to study geography at the University of Oxford (BA and DPhil). Best known as a multi-award-winning documentary photographer, Franklin’s paintings and drawings expand on his interest in the interface between nature and humankind; presenting at close-range the personality and texture of the natural world, as well as what the artist describes as ‘the anatomy of colour’.

During the 1980s, Franklin worked as a correspondent for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris. During that time his coverage of the Sahel famine was widely celebrated, and his 1989 photograph of a man defying a tank in Tiananmen Square, China, won him a World Press Photo Award. Since 1990, Franklin has completed over 20 assignments for National Geographic and, over the last twenty years, many other long-form projects concerned primarily with man and the environment. These include ‘Sea Fever’, a documentary project about the British coastline, funded by the National Trust, and ‘The Time of Trees’, a photographic essay examining the social relationship between nature and society through the prism of trees.

Further publications of Franklin’s work also include ‘Europe: Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux’, 2008, Thames & Hudson; ‘Narcissus’, 2013 and ‘Analogies’, 2019 both published by Hatje Cantz and ‘Traces’, 2023, published by Dewi Lewis.  In 2016 Phaidon published ‘The Documentary Impulse, Stuart Franklin’ and in 2020 Franklin’s book ‘Ambiguity Revisited: Communicating with Pictures’ was published by Ibidem Verlag.

Stuart Franklin has been a Magnum photographer since 1985 and lives and works in Gozo, Malta.