‘It’s not only what the work is, but, what the work does, in better communicating how we are connected’. FR
Franklyn Rodgers is an award-winning artist, visual strategist and creative director, whose practice explores the process and placement of the portrait as a cultural arbiter in the activation of agency.
I am an Artist and change influencer, disrupting the process and the placement of the portrait through critical thinking, strategic research and investigation. This practice expands the content and context in the narratives and language used to create and give the work agency. It is about the power of an alternative narrative.
I believe when a leap of faith is made and the work is challenged through the trilogy of personal truth, societal truth and empirical truth, we present an expansion in our capacity to transport, transform and ultimately transcend.
The work takes us on a journey of discovery, confronting an approach to a new narrative and connecting stories to people and possibilities, amplifying in collaboration how we better connect to the value of shared identities and expand our collective understanding. If we can help shape a stronger belief in what someone feels is possible, the stories they connect to will empower their own story.
This approach developed shifts the language of the way we ignite and how we reconnect in the visual dialect. It shares a wider understanding of identity and what that recognition can do for making an aesthetic cultural language visible in the dialogue of contemporary portraiture.
The language of photography is still young in its infancy. In the same sense that it takes a village to raise a child, we must value how we can collectively push or support that learning to make a positive change in our outcome.
Writing a new language for the future shows the value of its recognition in how that can enable a new perspective.
Franklyn has participated internationally in solo and group exhibitions including: ‘Underexposed’, W1Curates, Oxford Street, London.‘Radiating Greatness’, JP Morgan and BCA, London. ‘Devotion: A Portrait of Loretta’, Autograph-ABP. ‘The Big 30’, Heart n Soul, The Albany and Deptford Lounge, London. ‘Underexposed’, National Portrait Gallery, London. ‘The 2011 Festival of Britain at London Southbank’. ‘Get Up, Stand Up Now’, Somerset House, London. ‘The African Continuum’, The United Nations, New York. ‘Counterbalance’ Royal Albert Hall, London. ‘Recontres au noir’, Arles, France. ‘Transforming the Crown’, The Studio Museum, Harlem, New York. ‘You can’t get from here to there’, Galerie Hunchentoot, Berlin.
Awards include NESTA Fellowship, Arts Council GFA, The London Arts Board, B.A.V.C San Francisco, Art 360 and nominated for the Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize.
‘The Philosophy of Strangers’ is his first monograph published by Autograph-ABP in 2007.
Franklyn’s work is held in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, Welcome Collection, Autograph-ABP, The Queen Mary University and Arts Council England.
