‘Looking Back’ – a talk with photographs outlining Stuart Franklin’s career in photography and its links to geography

Stuart Franklin is a professor of documentary photography who teaches photography and visual storytelling at Volda University College in Norway. During his early career he photographed the civil war in Lebanon, unemployment in Britain and famine in Sudan. In 1989 he photographed the uprising in Tiananmen Square and shot one of the ‘Tank Man’ photographs, first published in Time magazine, as well as widely documenting the uprising in Beijing, earning him a World Press Photo award. After travelling with Greenpeace to Antarctica in 1989, Franklin then spent nearly 20 years working on a range of stories for National Geographic. More recently he has worked on documentary projects about doctors working in Syria, and immigration in Calais.

Stuart Franklin has published a number of books, including Footprint: Our landscape in Flux (2008) which documents Europe’s changing landscape. His most recent book, The Documentary Impulse (2016) investigates the nature of truth in reporting and the drive towards self-representation beginning 50,000 years ago with cave art through to the various iterations and impulses that have guided documentary photography along its differing tracks for nearly 200 years.

Franklin completed a BA and DPhil in Geography at Oxford as a mature student (1995-2000).

The seminar will begin at 1.30pm in the Halford Mackinder Lecture Theatre at SoGE. There will be a short time for questions after the talk, and then we invite you to join us for a reception in Gottmann A&B at 2.30pm, where Stuart Franklin will be available for further discussion.