Traces

by Stuart Franklin (photographer)

Traces takes us on a journey to the walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan; to the twisting tree-roots of Angkor Wat; to the chewing gum trees of Mexico; to the ancient olive trees of the Mediterranean littoral; and home to some of the oldest trees in England and Wales. It ends on a high note, the promise of revival for the elm tree in Europe, and the ash tree in Britain. For Stuart Franklin, landscape and memory combine as a means of seeing and documenting the world. Here the emphasis is on trees. Their presence (or absence) can rarely be separated from human history and human intervention. Franklin explores that hybrid space between nature and society, and between nature and memory. The photographs gaze out at the sublime and sometimes haunting landscape, and inwards to memories that the strange, crooked forms evoke and recapture. Franklin introduces the work in an extended essay and there are supporting texts by the British sculptor, David Nash and the Senior Curator in Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Barnes.

244 pages, Hardcover

Published October 12, 2023

About the author

Stuart Franklin studied photography and film at West Surrey College of Art and Design and geography at the University of Oxford. During the 1980s Franklin worked as a correspondent for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris before joining Magnum Photos in 1985, where he is currently Vice President.
Franklin's best-known photograph is from Tiananmen Square, China, 1989 - a man defying a tank, for which he won a World Press award. Franklin was awarded the Tom Hopkinson Award for published photojournalism and the Christian Aid prize for humanitarian photography whilst covering the Sahel famine in 1984-5. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

Since 1990, Franklin has completed around twenty assignments for National Geographic Magazine. This has been work of a social documentary nature that has taken him many times to Central and South America, to China and South-East Asia, and Europe, where he recently (2002) completed a story on European unification. His other publications include The Time of Trees (Leonardo Arte: Milan, 1999) and La Citta Dinamica (Mondadori: Milan, 2003). His recent project Hotel Afrique will be exhibited from 6th October 2005 at the Pitzhanger Gallery, London.