Stuart Franklin has photographed some of the most important news events of the 21st century as
well as producing many acclaimed personal projects. Franklin’s three most recent books: Narcissus
(Hatje Cantz, 2013), Analogies (Hatje Cantz, 2019) and Traces (Dewi Lewis, 2023) focus on landscape
and memory. This work, that began in Norway in 2009, has – in parallel – led to a shift from
photography back to drawing and painting.

Franklin was born in London in 1956. He studied drawing and painting at Oxford Polytechnic and at
the Sir John Cass School of Art under Leonard McComb RA before completing a BA in photography at
West Surrey College of Art and Design.

It was in 1989, then a member of Magnum Photos, that Franklin took his acclaimed photographs in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where a demonstration for freedom ended in a massacre. Between
1990 and 2008 he photographed about twenty stories for National Geographic Magazine.
His work is held in national collections and exhibited worldwide; recent solo exhibitions: The Dogon,
Arthur Ross Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Heiberg Cummings Gallery, New
York (2010); Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux, Art Science Museum, Singapore, (2012);
Farmscapes, National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, (2012); Narcissus, Kunstmuseet Kube, Ålesund,
Norway (2012); Temples of Stone at the Leica Gallery, London and Spazju Kreattiv, Valletta, (2018);
Traces at the Leica Gallery, Vienna (2024/2025); Characters in Search of an Author, MPM, Valletta,
Malta (May – July 2026) – 35 paintings, 10 etchings.

Franklin has published thirteen books to date including The Documentary Impulse (Phaidon, 2016), a
book popular with students, which investigates the nature of truth in reporting and the drive
towards self-representation in photography. Ambiguity Revisited: Communicating with Pictures
(Ibidem Verlag, Stuttgart, 2020) examines the role of ambiguity in literature and art.