Stuart Franklin | Footprint our landscape in flux

Stuart Franklin's photographic career began when he started work for the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph Magazine in London and later on with Agence Presse Sygma in Paris.  During his time at Sygma, 1980-1985, he absorbed skills of new photography, while also following Henri Cartier-Bresson's approach to photography; Franklin says how Cartier-Bresson's work influenced basically everything that he attempted with the way that Cartier-Bresson's work was curious, gentle, surreal with beautiful compositions. In 1989 Franklin took his acclaimed photographs in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where a demonstration for freedom ended in a massacre. After this he then began to move away from news photography, and into magazine feature photography. During 1990 till 2004 he photographed stories for National Geographic Magazine. Along with this he pursued many photographic projects which would take him on long periods of travelling. He then decided that he wanted to pursue and a better theoretical understanding of some of the issues that he had confronted, doing so he went on to do a university degree in 1997, which he ended up with a degree in geography from Oxford University, then going on to complete a doctoral thesis there.
In this series of work Franklin's images portray a landscape in flux; the face of Europe has undergone a continual metamorphosis, either because of changes in its climate or due to geological activity, such as volcanoes or in particular with more recent years, the result of transformations that have been brought about by humans. These images show how humans have impacted on the world, signs of destruction are seen, though these aren't all reasons fully due to humans but they are of man-made objects which were built by humans and they have let them go to waste away. There are lots of earthy tones filling these images, their tones affected by the weather conditions which impacts on the overall mood of the image. The images can make you consider the negative impact that humans may have on the world as everything turns to ruins, yet around they still build new things but not repair what they already have, only adding to the mass of destruction that they are causing.



Sources:
Stuart Franklin, Footprint our landscape in flux, Thames and Hudson book.
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