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 FranklinReading 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 FranklinIt's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.
Stuart FranklinAfter my mother died, I lived with relatives. Reading was a means of escaping into other worlds, as photography, much later, was to become.
Stuart FranklinThere 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