Stuart Franklin (1956, England)
A personal landscape project
Stuart Franklin has to be considered one of Nordic Light’s most loyal friends. He has been a festival guest for the past two years. In 2009 he was a visiting lecturer. The following year he came as curator for the controversial photography exhibition Point of No Return. In the spring of 2011 he also led one of Nordic Light’s workshops which was held on an oil platform in the Draugen oil field and a natural gas plant in the Ormen Lange oil field, the first workshop of its kind. Stuart Franklin returns as a festival guest this year to the beautiful coastal town of Kristiansund. His exhibition Narcissus is based on his latest black-and-white nature pictures from the picturesque island of Otrøya near Molde.
In addition to being a photographer, Stuart Franklin has also trained as a geographer. Consequently, he is an ardent environmentalist. However, he began his career as a press photographer for the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph Magazine in London. He is now one of the leading photographers in the world’s most esteemed photography agency Magnum Photos. The agency was started in 1947 and has the world’s best photojournalists as its members. During the period 2006-2009 Stuart was the agency’s president.
Stuart Franklin has had a range of prestigious assignments for National Geographic Magazine, but it was during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in China in 1989 that he was really at the right place at the right time. His picture of the man with the shopping bags holding back a column of Chinese T59 tanks has become an icon. Stuart has helped document, and consequently helped focus world attention on, famine in the Sudan, the conflict in Northern Ireland and the civil war in Sri Lanka, as well as bombings and massacres around the world. One thing is indisputable; this man does not shy away from a conflict zone. His artistic expression is just as bold, and his work is both provocative and moving. Stuart is a passionate advocate of freedom of expression, and his pictures sometimes cross the boundaries of some people’s notions of political correctness.
These days, Stuart no longer hunts down conflicts and war zones. The natural world has become his focus and his passion is for landscapes, deep dives into nature and the splendour of the Norwegian coastline. Franklin claims that he was bewitched by the region of Møre and Romsdal after his first visit to Nordic Light. In order to be able to photograph the area more intensively, he bought a cabin in the municipality of Midsund. People who are born and bred in the countryside sometimes spend little time appreciating the beauty of nature. Stuart sees it clearly and acknowledges the difficulty involved in capturing it with photography. Despite the fact that he has photographed landscapes the world over, Stuart says the Romsdal coast has proven to be more of a challenge than he imagined: its wildly contrasting light and weather conditions are the main factors he faces. Lucky then that he is a patient soul.
