Traces

• Photographer
  Stuart Franklin, United Kingdom
• Studio
  Magnum Photos

The book and exhibition – Traces – is about nature and memory. Its subject is trees. I trace the journeys along which trees have seeded: the walnut, apple and mulberry along the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan; the ancient olive trees along the Via Augusta in Catalonia, also in Malta, Sicily and Puglia. I follow the roots of rainforest trees dug out of the soil in Laos and ferried across the Mekong river in China, the dying spruce trees in the Bavarian forest.

“We see objects”, wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “through the spectacles of memory”.