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 FranklinNewspaper 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 FranklinPhotography 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 FranklinWhat 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