Latest Stuart Franklin Quotes from Interviews

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
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
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
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
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
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
I think, oddly, that the world of the amateur is quite self-contained, and it depends on "likes" from other amateurs to perpetuate itself. Of course an awful lot of my colleagues are involved with Instagram - they get likes and dislikes, maybe just likes, I don't know - but I think that it's far less self-contained, the world I work in. It goes off in different directions, and is dependent on responses different from a tick or a like or whatever.

Stuart Franklin

Thinking, Different, World

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Well, people from the "me" generation use photography to show off what they are doing, to show the world themselves and their friends. Those sort of diarized accounts have always been there. But the phenomena of making those diaries public is new, isn't it?

Stuart Franklin

Photography, People, World

Source: www.guernicamag.com
Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.

Stuart Franklin

Tree, Different, Social Media

Source: www.guernicamag.com
I have a huge respect for the dedication that many people have, on the other side of the Atlantic, to photography. You can count them on one hand here. There's less respect for a Magnum photographer in Britain than there is in America. It's a much more postmodern culture here.

Stuart Franklin

Photography, Dedication, People

Source: www.guernicamag.com
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I was always interested in drawing and painting. I enrolled in college to study painting. But I didn't have any livelihood when I graduated. My mother died very young, and I didn't have any home, so I had to find a way to earn a living. It seemed to me that photography - to the great disappointment, I have to say, of my painting teacher - could offer that. So I went and did a degree in photography, and then after that I could go out and get paid for work. For portraits, things like that.

Stuart Franklin

Photography, Mother, Teacher

Source: www.guernicamag.com
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
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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Born: July 16, 1956
Occupation: Photographer
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