Stuart Franklin
As a photojournalist, he covered subjects ranging from Sri Lanka’s
civil war to the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, but a growing desire
to understand the issues behind the stories he was reporting led him to
take a degree at Oxford University. Since then, he has worked on several long-term photographic projects
documenting the relationship between humanity and the environment.
Olivia Edward talks to him about how geography has influenced his work
and his new book, Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux
I feel in my blood a geographer as much as a photographer.The two are completely braided in my brain. I don’t know which took over the other but I’ve always loved to travel, and the more you travel, especially if you have a curiosity about the world, the more that curiosity grows, and the more inspired you become.
Teachers can make geography extraordinarily interesting or desperately dull. The geography teacher I had when I was eight was ex-RAF, quite stuck on geomorphology and not very interesting. Whether complex subjects such as geography can be brought alive depends on the knowledge, enthusiasm and confidence of its teachers.
I became more interested in geography when the discipline started to grow up, and started to engage with topical issues such as climate change, deforestation, habitat loss and glacial retreat. And now the world is changing very quickly – for example, this is the first year when there are as many people living in urban areas as there are in the countryside – and geography is able to understand those changes and transitions.
When I got a contract with National Geographic, I started to take on issues I didn’t really understand, so I thought, if I took some time to study [geography] I’d gain a better understanding of these issues and become a better commentator. Now I can approach a subject thinking, ‘That’s important, that’s less important, that relates to something else.’
Geography empowered me and allowed me to do my own thing. It gave me a lot more confidence to do the work I was being assigned to do but also to propose my own stories. National Geographic used to construct its stories so they were about a particular place or country. I remember having a discussion about doing an article on the human impact on the Galapagos Islands and I said I wouldn’t do the story unless we could cover the Pacific Coast of Ecuador, too, and really show the reader how these two things are connected (the higher salaries on the Galapagos mean more people want to work there). They agreed, and I was able to produce a much more robust and interesting report.
I wish more journalists had studied geography. They would have a better grasp of what they were writing about, especially when they went to cover natural disasters. It’s a good basis for understanding process and how A comes to B. [For example, in the recent earthquake in Sichuan], if you build with unconsolidated brick, the schools are going to collapse [during an earthquake]. If the journalists had studied geography, they would have known this is the major cause of death in most earthquakes and been able to make useful connections for the reader.
What British geography lacks is great geographers. I tend not to read the journal pieces any more because a lot of them are really bad, really boring, really parochial and really dull. There are very few great geographers that are able to pull a lot of case studies together in a really intelligent way, in a way that, say, David Harvey could during the 1970s and ’80s.
A lot of geographers write really well, they’re just not given the chance to. They’re given the chance to talk to PhD students and bring money in. As I understand it, there’s such a hunger for money now in universities.
Television is a bit like listening to a particularly politicised grandmother telling you how everything has gone wrong. It’s very issues-based. If you’re talking about landscape, it’s always a disaster, it’s always changing for the worse. [In my book Footprint] I try to allow people an openness, a bit like walking into a gallery of Courbet, or Millais. You can muse on different aspects of the landscape. I’m not telling people what to do. It’s simply my comment on how the landscape is changing.
Politics plays an enormous role in whether habitats are lost or saved. When I was working on my book In the Time of Trees, I realised the way people have gone about dealing with saving forests is really wrong. Instead of some NGO buying a big forest and thinking, ‘It’s okay now, we’ve saved it’, we should be dealing with the much bigger problems of illiteracy and corruption. But we’re not, and one of the reasons is because they fall into different camps. And that’s what’s so good about geography. It can deal with economics and social issues and biology. That’s why I love it: you can handle all these different topics through one discipline.
Geography got its octopus shape at the end of the 19th century when Halford Mackinder gave his speech to the Royal Geographical Society talking about linking physical and human science with social science. Since then, it has been able to reach out into any discipline and it’s become one of the most liberal, exciting, far-reaching disciplines that I know.
Curriculum vitae
• 1956: born in Guys Hospital, London
• 1972: left school
• 1976–79: studied photography and film at West Surrey College of Art and Design
• 1979: began work as a freelance photographer for clients including the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph
• 1980–85: worked for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris
• 1985: joined Magnum Photos
• 1989: won a World Press Photo Award for his image of a young man standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square
• 1995–97: studied geography at Oxford University. Won Gibbs Prize for Geography (for the top first)
• 2002: completed a PhD at Oxford University on the social function of Bialowieza Forest, Poland, and Beloveskaya Forest, Belarus
In Stuart Franklin’s latest book, Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux, published by Thames and Hudson, is out now. He will be presenting lectures at the RGS headquarters in London on 20 October and the National Gallery, Edinburgh, on 22 October
October 2008
I feel in my blood a geographer as much as a photographer.The two are completely braided in my brain. I don’t know which took over the other but I’ve always loved to travel, and the more you travel, especially if you have a curiosity about the world, the more that curiosity grows, and the more inspired you become.
Teachers can make geography extraordinarily interesting or desperately dull. The geography teacher I had when I was eight was ex-RAF, quite stuck on geomorphology and not very interesting. Whether complex subjects such as geography can be brought alive depends on the knowledge, enthusiasm and confidence of its teachers.
I became more interested in geography when the discipline started to grow up, and started to engage with topical issues such as climate change, deforestation, habitat loss and glacial retreat. And now the world is changing very quickly – for example, this is the first year when there are as many people living in urban areas as there are in the countryside – and geography is able to understand those changes and transitions.
When I got a contract with National Geographic, I started to take on issues I didn’t really understand, so I thought, if I took some time to study [geography] I’d gain a better understanding of these issues and become a better commentator. Now I can approach a subject thinking, ‘That’s important, that’s less important, that relates to something else.’
Geography empowered me and allowed me to do my own thing. It gave me a lot more confidence to do the work I was being assigned to do but also to propose my own stories. National Geographic used to construct its stories so they were about a particular place or country. I remember having a discussion about doing an article on the human impact on the Galapagos Islands and I said I wouldn’t do the story unless we could cover the Pacific Coast of Ecuador, too, and really show the reader how these two things are connected (the higher salaries on the Galapagos mean more people want to work there). They agreed, and I was able to produce a much more robust and interesting report.
I wish more journalists had studied geography. They would have a better grasp of what they were writing about, especially when they went to cover natural disasters. It’s a good basis for understanding process and how A comes to B. [For example, in the recent earthquake in Sichuan], if you build with unconsolidated brick, the schools are going to collapse [during an earthquake]. If the journalists had studied geography, they would have known this is the major cause of death in most earthquakes and been able to make useful connections for the reader.
What British geography lacks is great geographers. I tend not to read the journal pieces any more because a lot of them are really bad, really boring, really parochial and really dull. There are very few great geographers that are able to pull a lot of case studies together in a really intelligent way, in a way that, say, David Harvey could during the 1970s and ’80s.
A lot of geographers write really well, they’re just not given the chance to. They’re given the chance to talk to PhD students and bring money in. As I understand it, there’s such a hunger for money now in universities.
Television is a bit like listening to a particularly politicised grandmother telling you how everything has gone wrong. It’s very issues-based. If you’re talking about landscape, it’s always a disaster, it’s always changing for the worse. [In my book Footprint] I try to allow people an openness, a bit like walking into a gallery of Courbet, or Millais. You can muse on different aspects of the landscape. I’m not telling people what to do. It’s simply my comment on how the landscape is changing.
Politics plays an enormous role in whether habitats are lost or saved. When I was working on my book In the Time of Trees, I realised the way people have gone about dealing with saving forests is really wrong. Instead of some NGO buying a big forest and thinking, ‘It’s okay now, we’ve saved it’, we should be dealing with the much bigger problems of illiteracy and corruption. But we’re not, and one of the reasons is because they fall into different camps. And that’s what’s so good about geography. It can deal with economics and social issues and biology. That’s why I love it: you can handle all these different topics through one discipline.
Geography got its octopus shape at the end of the 19th century when Halford Mackinder gave his speech to the Royal Geographical Society talking about linking physical and human science with social science. Since then, it has been able to reach out into any discipline and it’s become one of the most liberal, exciting, far-reaching disciplines that I know.
Curriculum vitae
• 1956: born in Guys Hospital, London
• 1972: left school
• 1976–79: studied photography and film at West Surrey College of Art and Design
• 1979: began work as a freelance photographer for clients including the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph
• 1980–85: worked for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris
• 1985: joined Magnum Photos
• 1989: won a World Press Photo Award for his image of a young man standing up to a tank in Tiananmen Square
• 1995–97: studied geography at Oxford University. Won Gibbs Prize for Geography (for the top first)
• 2002: completed a PhD at Oxford University on the social function of Bialowieza Forest, Poland, and Beloveskaya Forest, Belarus
In Stuart Franklin’s latest book, Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux, published by Thames and Hudson, is out now. He will be presenting lectures at the RGS headquarters in London on 20 October and the National Gallery, Edinburgh, on 22 October
October 2008
