Creative Documentary and Photojournalism with Magnum Photos and Spéos

About the Mentors

Stuart Franklin

Stuart Franklin combines a direct documentary-style with a strong personal vision. He has photographed some of the most important news events of the 21st Century as well as producing many acclaimed personal projects, exploring subjects relating to the Anthropocene. Franklin says his practice “repaints the boundaries of documentary in order to create a sense of freedom”. His core interest today is in producing work, mostly about nature-society relations, that is open to multiple interpretations.

It was in 1989 that Franklin took his acclaimed photographs in 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 2008 he photographed about twenty stories for National Geographic Magazine. During this time, Stuart decided to pursue a better theoretical understanding of some of the issues he confronted, by embarking on a period of academic study in 1995. He graduated with a first class degree in Geography from Oxford University and went on to complete his doctoral thesis there in 2001. Franklin was awarded a professorship in documentary photography in 2016.

He has been published by numerous global publications including The Guardian, Sunday Times Magazine, Geo, Art Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic Magazine.

Franklin joined Magnum Photos in 1985 and has been a full member since 1989, serving as the agency’s elected president between 2006-2009.

Lua Ribeira 

Lúa Ribeira’s practice is characterized by its collaborative nature, extensive research and an immersive approach to her subject matter. She is interested in using the photographic medium as a means to create encounters that establish relationships and question structural separations between people.

Ribeira was born in 1986, in Galicia, northern Spain. She graduated in Graphic Design at BAU School of Design, Barcelona in 2011, and earned a first-class honours in a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of South Wales in 2016. Since graduating, she has continued her academic engagement as a guest lecturer at various universities, including the University of Westminster, University of the West of England, and Complutense University of Madrid.

Antoine d'Agata 

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.

During his time in New York, in 1991-92, d’Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993, he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte, and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001, he published Hometown and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005.

In 2004 d’Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World’s Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo.

Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.