I didn’t know Martine Franck, and although I have occasionally seen and admired her photographs, had never really formed any clear views about her and her work. So when she died on 16 August, aged 74, I didn’t feel I had anything to say about her, though I did read the obituary in The Guardian and look at her work on Magnum.
Today Le Journal de la Photographie (in English) devotes itself to a collection of short tributes about her written by nine people who did know her, and it makes interesting reading, as well as three comments by Franck on her own images, which include probably the only one that most people in photography would instantly know as by her, a man in a hammock watching women at a pool in Le Brusc, Provence in 1976.
I hadn’t realised before that she was Belgian – born in Antwerp – and had an English mother. And while on the subject of places, I can tell Magnum that Newcastle upon Tyne is how they should spell it, and that it isn’t in Yorkshire! But I do like the photograph Franck took there, along with many others by her on the Magnum pages.