Three Magnum Photos alumni—Stuart Franklin, Mark Power and Jacob Aue Sobol—are currently on show at the ArtScience Museum in an exhibition not to be missed.
Best regarded for his iconic photograph of a student challenging army tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, acclaimed Brit photographer Stuart Franklin exhibits his long-term work, Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux, which tracks Europe’s altering landscape through the effects of pollution, flooding and the diminishing of glaciers. It also documents the positive side of environmental changes that includes the presence of sanitary water, regenerating forests in Scotland and Poland, and cleaner cities, creating an austere feel through the images.
More poetic is Brit compatriot Mark Powers’ The Sound of Two Songs, a photographic journey of a foreigner’s impression of Poland. Initially a Magnuminstigated project, the series taken over five years sees Power making more than 20 trips back to Poland as he studies the country’s changes while casting an impressionistic sojourn of its people, spaces and the interactions between the two elements.
But the most confounding is Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol’s black-and-white series I, Tokyo, shot with a pocket camera which gives the overall series a snapshot quality. Japan’s young punks, adolescents and everyday characters get cast in a whole new light as Sobol prowls the streets alone, capturing some of Tokyo’s most interesting street spirits. Sobol’s subjects, many of which surprisingly make eye contact with him, emote painful loss and alienation, something the photographer was also experiencing in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Outside In: A Magnum Photos Showcase is on through January 6, 2013 at the ArtScience Museum.
