Background

Martine Franck was born on April 2, 1938 in Antwerp, Belgium to the Belgian banker Louis Franck and his British wife, Evelyn. After her birth the family moved almost immediately to London. A year later, her father joined the British army, and the rest of the family were evacuated to the United States, spending the remainder of the Second World War on Long Island and in Arizona.

Education

Martine Franck was in boarding school from the age of six onwards. She attended Heathfield School, an all-girls boarding school close to Ascot in England, and studied the history of art from the age of 14. Martine Franck studied art history at the University of Madrid and at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.

Career

In 1963, Franck's photography career started following trips to the Far East, having taken pictures with her cousin’s Leica camera. Returning to France in 1964, now possessing a camera of her own, she became an assistant to photographers Eliot Elisofon and Gjon Mili at Time-Life. By 1969 she was a busy freelance photographer for magazines such as Vogue, Life and Sports Illustrated, and the official photographer of the Théâtre du Soleil (a position she held for 48 years). From 1970 to 1971 she worked in Paris at the Agence Vu photo agency, and in 1972 she co-founded the Viva agency.

In 1980, Martine Franck joined the Magnum Photos cooperative agency as a "nominee", and in 1983 she became a full member. She was one of a very small number of women to be accepted into the agency.

In 1983, Martine Franck completed a project for the now-defunct French Ministry of Women's Rights and in 1985 she began collaborating with the non-profit International Federation of Little Brothers of the Poor. In 1993, she first traveled to the Irish island of Tory where she documented the tiny Gaelic community living there. Martine Franck also traveled to Tibet and Nepal, and with the help of Marilyn Silverstone photographed the education system of the Tibetan Tulkus monks.

In 2003 and 2004 Martine Franck returned to Paris to document the work of theater director Robert Wilson who was staging La Fontaine's fables at the Comédie Française.

Nine books of Franck's photographs have been published. She continued working even after she was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2010. Her last exhibition was in October 2011 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. The exhibit consisted of 62 portraits of artists "coming from somewhere else" collected from 1965 through 2010. This same year, there were collections of portraits shown at New York's Howard Greenberg Gallery and at the Claude Bernard Gallery, Paris.

Achievements

• In 2005 Martine Franck was made a chevalier of the French Légion d'Honneur.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Tory Island Images

    (Magnum photographer Martine Franck shows that, given some...)

  • Martine Franck: One Day To The Next (Aperture Monograph)

    (Martine Franck: One Day to the Next includes more than 10...)

    2005
  • Martine Franck: Women / Femmes

    (Martine Franck has travelled the globe photographing the ...)

    2010
  • Magna Brava: Magnum's Women Photographers 1999
  • Martine Franck. D'un jour, l'autre 1998
  • Martine Franck 2007
  • Martine Franck: Photographe: (Exposition) Musee de La Vie Romantique 2002
  • Venus d'ailleurs: Peintres et sculpteurs à Paris depuis 1945
  • De Temps en Temps: Photographies de Martine Franck 1988
  • Martine Franck I Grandi Fotografi 1983

• photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

  • photography

Connections

Father:

Louis Franck

Mother:

Evelyn

Spouse:

Henri Cartier-Bresson

References

• Martine Franck
  2018
• Martine Franck Presents a collection of fifty-five images from the Magnum photographer that document the lives of people living in isolated communities or on the edge of society.
  2007
• Martine Franck • Photographer Profile • Magnum Photos logo cross cart plus plus cart gallery-icon Martine Franck joined Magnum in 1980. She made portraits of artists and writers, but her main focus was humanitarian reportages.