LONDON, ENGLAND.- PM Gallery in West London, in association with Magnum Photos, is proud to present Stuart Franklin’s extraordinary photographic essay, Hotel Afrique, a series of 51 images examining the hybrid space between global culture and Africa’s past and present identity.

Throughout 2004/05 Stuart Franklin captured images in and around the elite hotels of Africa. These spaces serve as an interface between the tribal, religious, social and cultural practices of the Continent and the uniform blanket of hotel-chain or international business culture: international cuisine, global musak, global TV, global design and international standards.

Yet these elite hotels are much more than hybrid spaces but serve as exclusive recreational or business enclaves in their own right, where the unseen economic resources of many countries – oil, diamonds, minerals – are bartered away behind closed doors. Beyond this, the story is yet more complex as these hotels, far from being despised as enclaves of the elite, have become ‘objects of desire’, where a wedding reception represents the highest form of devotion and where employment, better paid and more prestigious than for similar work elsewhere, can guarantee an income for an entire kinship network.

The exhibition collects the images into distinct groupings, delineating the hotel interiors, the people working and staying at the hotels and the often markedly different exterior landscapes which lie within the hotel environs. These images work to counter a prevailing myth of Africa’s dependence on the West and yet also suggest an uneasy balance of economic and social priorities. It is in this tense medium of culture and counterculture that Hotel Afrique finds its voice as a photographic essay. As such the exhibition serves as a valuable cultural contribution to the many and varied representations of Africa in the 21st Century. Hotel Afrique will tour to France and Germany in 2006.

Stuart Franklin - Stuart Franklin was born in London in 1956. During the 1980s Franklin worked as a correspondent for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris before joining Magnum Photos in 1985, where he remains a co-member. Franklin's most well known photograph is from Tiananmen Square, China, 1989 - a man defying a tank, for which he won a World Press award. He has taught on African society in transition at the School of Geography at Oxford University. Franklin was also awarded the Tom Hopkinson Award for published photojournalism and the Christian Aid prize for humanitarian photography whilst covering the Sahel famine in 1984-5.