Stuart Franklin studied photography and film at West Surrey College of Art and Design. He also holds a BA and a Ph.D in geography from the University of Oxford. His documentary photography has taken him to Central and South America, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Since 2004, he has focused on long-term projects concerned primarily with man and the environment.
January last year I travelled to a remote part of Greece called Arcadia. To the ancient Greeks Arcadia was a rural utopian idyll where rustics lazed happily in the countryside, in a land of plenty. Returning 5000 years later to the same region of Greece was quite a different experience. Instead of a bucolic green landscape, I found one devastated by the relentless hunt for fossil fuels. 60% of Greece’s electricity is derived from lignite (brown coal). This involves stripping away whole landscapes – fields, villages, whatever, to get at the stuff to feed the nearby power station. What I found in Megalopolis was Greece’s second largest lignite mine, where the village of Anthohori was simply wiped off the map by bulldozers digging ever further into the earth to feed coal to the fire.
All that remained when I got to village was the church of Santa Maria fifteen feet up on a pedestal of earth after the rest of the village was demolished. Why was it there? Because the mining teams were too superstitious to knock it down in case God’s wrath enflamed them. God’s wrath is an interesting concept when considering climate change and such matters. Before the 19th century (even today in some places) any severe storm or earthquake was blamed on God’s anger at the people. Luckily science stepped in and recognized there may be other reasons for hurricanes – such as climate cycles maybe exacerbated by our own irresponsible use of fossil fuels. But not in time to save Arcadia...
"Nature", wrote Raymond Williams, "is perhaps the most complicated word in the English language". Nature photography, however, is simple - or at least unchallenging. The wonder of the natural world is the usual refrain, gasped between shots of galloping zebras, prowling snow leopards or displays of exotic snakes, birds, insects and so forth.
Photography inherited many of its genres from painting - portraiture, nudes, still life, and a particular kind of un-peopled landscape which has become attached to "nature". By abstraction, nature photography obscures our view of what's really going on in tropical forests or the African savannah. Nature photography commodifies the environment for its own ends.
Tourism promoters use nature photography to mask the fact that other people also live in the destinations they wish to market. Look at any holiday brochure advertising the Galapagos Islands. You won't spot any of the twenty thousand inhabitants, or their homes, or their economic activity. In safari brochures it's more or less the same, although some exotic tribespeople are included, almost as another natural feature.
Although the boundaries are not always obvious, environmental photography differs from nature photography in its approach. By attending to the human presence as a part of, and impacting upon, the natural world it sets out to present a more realistic view of Planet Earth dominated, as it is, by us.
The world that I grew up in will be, from today, a poorer place. It is with great sadness I have to write that Philip - a monumental, irrepressible force in photography and in life - and a courageous fighter against the cancer that finally defeated him - passed away early this morning.
Philip's passing is an enormous loss to us all at Magnum, and I am sure to everyone who knew him. It was a privilege to have brushed, even lightly, against his charm, his brilliance and his passion for photojournalism. Those who only know him through his work will have missed his skills as an orator, raconteur, wit and polemicist. He remained the lovely man that he was - graceful and welcoming - especially to young people trying to make a start in photography. He had much to pass on, not just about the importance of "real" photography, but about the art and craft of picture-making.
Philip was born in Rhuddlan, near Rhyl in Wales on 18th February 1936 and it was there, at the age of 16, that he learnt an early lesson about photography - from Henri Cartier-Bresson: "The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten."
It was Philip's consummate skill as a picture maker, carefully able to draw the viewer closer and closer to his subjects through his emotionally-charged compositions that lent such power to his work. Philip was always concerned with individuals - their personal and intimate suffering more than any particular class or ideological struggle. And the strength of his vision, that inspired so many of us, led Henri Cartier-Bresson to write of Philip: "not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths."
Philip's iconic work on the Vietnam War, an unprecedented work, published in 1971 under the title 'Vietnam Inc.' is arguably the most articulate and compelling anti-war statement made by any photojournalist ever. Indeed it led Noam Chomsky to comment that: "If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn't have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan".
Indeed, it was Philip's passion for peace that led to greatness in his later work. In 2005 he published "Viet Nam at Peace" a 25 year study exploring the long term consequences of the war. The first Westerner to travel by road from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City after the war, and later the Ho Chi Minh trail, he amassed an unparalleled photographic record of the post-war transformation of this country.
Thoroughly industrious and tenacious to the end, Philip had just completed a new book of his less known studies of British life in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, entitled 'Recollections', and in the last few weeks before his death, Philip became thoroughly engaged in compiling his life's work documenting Cambodia.
Philip enriched all our lives with his courage, his empathy, his passion, his wit and his wisdom; and for many he gave to photojournalism its moral soul. He died as he wanted so passionately that we should live - in peace. In his last days he was together with his loving family and friends at his side.
He leaves behind his loving family, Fanny Ferrato, Katherine Holden, Donna Ferrato and Heather Holden.
I was asked by Magnum’s Tokyo office to attend the opening of a newly curated Magnum Group exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Tokyo, as aficionados know, offers many things to the passing visitor: disarming politeness, a profusion of electronic noises and gadgets, a city district dedicated to people’s obsessions, and rice wine.
Tokyo, Japan. 1997. Restaurant. Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos. Part of the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Alienated by jet lag and language difficulties such offerings are a welcome sign of having arrived somewhere with a distinct local culture but at the same at a truly global city.
