LONDON.- Earlier this year, photographer Stuart Franklin travelled to Egypt and Morocco, inspired by the North African journey made by Magnum founder George Rodger, 60 years previously across the Sahara Desert. In the spirit of Rodger, Franklin viewed the landscape through his geographer’s eye, comparing the natural and honed stone he encountered in the monumental landscape. Temples of Stone, exhibited here for the first time, is part of the Magnum Retold, a 70th anniversary project, celebrating the agency’s powerful legacy of documentary storytelling.

George Rodger embarked on his journey across the Sahara with his wife, Jinx Rodger, in 1957 and covered 4000 miles in 90 days. The resulting photographs offered a rare insight into the landscapes and inhabitants of what was one of the world’s most remote and unexplored terrains. Franklin’s contemporary journey reflects on Rodger’s travels, recording, once more, a world of both human and natural forms, chiselled and weathered in the harsh desert terrain. Franklin’s vision is a tribute to the original work of Rodger.

“George Rodger’s tremendous contribution to Magnum and his travels in North Africa were the starting point for this series of photographs. George Rodger loved the desert, Africa, the open road, the unexplored in landscape, and people untouched by modernity.

This last feature has gone, but I found the rest much as he’d left them in the 1950s. Starting points are wonderful opportunities for photographers and artists. A path has been cleared, but the road is unmade. This allows for the creative possibility to build something new. I’ve always been interested in landscape and especially the interface between nature and society. The joy is in the way everything overlaps: weathered statues and rock buttresses, human and natural forms, each chiselled out of the desert and stone outcrops in a union of dream world archaeology. This eventually became the focus, the road ahead for me. It led to this project and tribute to George Rodger.” Stuart Franklin

Temples of Stone was created as part of Magnum Retold, a new series in celebration of Magnum Photos’ 70th anniversary; current Magnum photographers have been asked to identify an archival photo-story that inspired them and use it as a starting point for their own contemporary story.

Stuart Franklin was born in London in 1956. He left school at 16, studied photography at West Surrey College of Art and Design and began his photographic career working for The Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph Magazine and later with Agence Presse Sygma in Paris. Franklin was invited to join Magnum in the summer of 1985 and has been a full member since 1989, serving most recently as the agency’s elected president between 2006-2009.

In 1989 that Stuart took his acclaimed photographs of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where a demonstration for freedom ended in a massacre. After that, he began to move away from news into magazine feature photography. Between 1990 and 2004 he photographed about twenty stories for National Geographic Magazine whilst pursuing a better theoretical understanding of some of the issues he confronted, by embarking on a period of academic study in 1997. He graduated with a first-class degree in Geography from Oxford University and went on to complete his doctoral thesis there in 2002. Franklin’s work has been the subject of numerous international solo exhibitions and monographs.