Stuart Franklin Quotes

• I Love photographing. It’s that simple.

  Stuart Franklin

  Simple

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• I love photographing. I love the experience of being around all the things that surround you when you go out to do work.

  Stuart Franklin

  Surround

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Good photographs aren't just complex. They are enigmatic. Images are beguiling. And the way they play into our psychology, into our visual cortex, is something we still don't understand.

  Stuart Franklin

  Psychology, Photograph, Enigmatic

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• As humans, we need to question all these notions. What does freedom mean for us? What are our responsibilities? It takes one-250th of a second to take a photograph. So I have the whole of the rest of that second - and of that day - to think.

  Stuart Franklin

  Mean, Responsibility, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Reading is always a way of forming a bond with other people. I'm not very good at socializing - I quite like spending time alone - so reading is a way of engaging quite deeply with the way other people think. Quite often when you meet other people socially you don't get to have a conversation of any depth. You end up talking about how well or how badly someone is doing at school or something of that sort. Questions like, "What we are," "Who we are," "Where are we going," you get those from literature and from people that spend some time thinking.

  Stuart Franklin

  Reading, School, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We sort of understand how painkillers work. You take one, and it reduces your headache. We don't understand how photographs work. And that, to me, is an essential problem as a practitioner.

  Stuart Franklin

  Problem, Headache, Photograph

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the same way, photography, for me, has fragmented. You do have people doing bodies of work - often with found photographs - that are quite hard to understand unless you got a very sophisticated visual history behind you. But there are different camps.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, People, Different

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We don't understand what photography is doing. We don't understand the power of its rhetoric. We don't understand why the Provoke photographers showed Tokyo city as a ghastly and alien city when it was really going through this period of mega-capitalist growth. It's a very, very, very powerful force, the photograph. People ask me why it has such an ability to captivate us. And I just don't know.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Powerful, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Photography for me has been tremendously good, because I'm not a very sociable person. I'm happy reading or sitting in the library or going for walks. So photography has brought me in contact with people and made me understand people in a way that I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't been a photographer. And so I'm grateful for that, really.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Reading, Grateful

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• What people that are professionals in the art world - both in literature and the other arts - always try to do is to recognize the feasibility of making the transition from the particular to the general - to make the transition from the portrait of one postman - to take Van Gogh, for example, to something that is every postman. That synecdotal transition that most selfies don't make. But we who live in this world, and not simply in our private realities, understand that that's the transition our art has to make.

  Stuart Franklin

  Art, Reality, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The world of photography is very self-aware. Everybody is always looking around. So it's quite difficult to stand up with a megaphone and declare, "This is what I think." As a reasonably shy person, I found it difficult to do that.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Thinking, Shy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think it's terribly important to reach out and understand all the different types of life and the different types of challenges that are present around the world. And I think the more people who can do that the better our planet will probably be.

  Stuart Franklin

  Thinking, People, Challenges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My current project was shot on film, and because of that I've spent my entire day removing dust-specks from negatives. You wouldn't have to do that on digital because you don't get dust on the scanner. I say to myself, "Why am I doing this all day?" I could have just bought a digital camera and I wouldn't have to remove dust-specks ever again. But when you move closer to a film image, it has a real truth to it. And I really like that.

  Stuart Franklin

  Real, Moving, Film

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Environmentalism is a personal thing - but it's also a planetary thing. It's about making deep connections. But it's also about recognizing the very human connection between species diversification and ourselves.

  Stuart Franklin

  Environmentalism

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We create these walls between fact and fiction, but often the difference between the two is as little as that between a real name and a pseudonym. So I'm not sure about those walls - certainly not in the realm of visual arts.

  Stuart Franklin

  Art, Wall, Real

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• In the documentary impulse, two species of 'fact' exist side by side: one is coolly objective and the other is fraught, diverse and emotive; one figurative, the other abstract; one prosaic, the other poetic; one factual, the other romantic.

  Stuart Franklin

  Poetic, Abstract, Impulse

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Photography was increasingly being seen as something outside the art world. As a sort of illustration. They just fired the director of photography at the Sunday Times Magazine - that's where everyone went with their photo essays in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. It was the place to get published. It is an issue. And I feel it. There's no budget. The budget-holders are very often people who've been to the professional colleges where art is not taught. So art as a part of education is something that's missing - since Thatcher's day, anyway.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Art, Sunday

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There's an awful lot of work being done that no one ever sees, or that is only seen in the gallery world. I feel that the public are losing touch with the great stuff that's being done in photography.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Done, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Newspaper photographs nowadays are highly tautologous. You'll have an article about, say, stopping the war. And the photograph that will be used is literally a poster that reads "Stop The War." Or you'll have a story about a cash crisis in Barcelona, and the only picture you'll see is an ATM in Barcelona. The problem is actually systemic. On the one hand, you'll have a picture of a soda can to "illustrate" an article about the dangers of sugary drinks. On the other hand, anything that's reasonable in documentary photography is snapped up by the art world and we never see it.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Art, War

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is a danger in our modern practice of using embedded journalism. As there is less and less money available for journalism to uphold its independence, there is a temptation for people to take short cuts. If this army or that army or this corporation is willing to pay for your flight or your accommodation, then it's much more difficult to tell what the real story might be. I do have a concern about that.

  Stuart Franklin

  Real, Army, Cutting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• After my mother died, I lived with relatives. Reading was a means of escaping into other worlds, as photography, much later, was to become.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Mother, Reading

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's certainly important to include text beside documentary photographs. Furthermore, it's important to include text in a way that's useful and accessible.

  Stuart Franklin

  Important, Photograph

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was a time, right up until the end of the Second World War and beyond, when white people in Europe thought that they basically owned the world and that everybody else was a sort of servant, or a curiosity, or whatever. And that informed 99 percent of the photographic practice that was done. Without being able to address that, I felt I would have failed in my attempt to explain what the urge to document is.

  Stuart Franklin

  War, People, Curiosity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was as big a reaction after the revelations about Assad's chemical weapons. Nevertheless, that photograph did strike a singular chord. Which leads us to a larger fact: we don't understand why certain photographs create such an upheaval in one's soul. You look at them and go, "Oh my gosh." And that doesn't happen with television. It's unique to photography. Photographs are unique in that they are a frame abstracted out of reality, out of, in this case, a civil war. A single event can carry so much weight. And that is extraordinary.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, War, Unique

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.

  Stuart Franklin

  Photography, Writing, Photographer

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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