Europe's Changing Places

This church (pictured above), near Megalopoli in Greece, used to be part of a village. By the time British photographer Stuart Franklin visited and took the picture in 2007, work crews had leveled the other buildings and scraped out the earth to extract lignite (brown coal), used to fuel a nearby power station. The crews were too superstitious to destroy a holy place, a guide told Franklin. Far above the new ground level, the edifice is now inaccessible.

Related

Photos

Fragile Planet

The image is emblematic of work that appears in Franklin's new book, Footprint: Our Landscape in Flux, a remarkable exploration of the human impact on Europe's terrain. It's much more than just a catalog of environmental degradation. Franklin, 52, and a Magnum photographer for more than 30 years, found his early inspiration for the series on a 2003 trip through Andalucian farmland; it was there that he saw vast swaths of the countryside covered — and intriguingly altered — by plastic sheets designed to protect against the elements and infestation. Franklin then crisscrossed Europe (from Portugal to Russia, Norway to Greece) documenting the changes he saw. His startling work captures artificial beaches, groomed ski slopes and blade-perfect golf courses; forests, mountains and cities. Through his lens, cross-country motorways become modern-day tethers, holding Europe together but blurring the distinctions for which the continent was once so well known.

Footprint is as much an exploration of how Europeans interpret the land — how people choose to manage their space and how, sometimes, they fail to do so — as it is about the land itself. Through it all Franklin, who holds a Ph.D. in geography, demonstrates an artist's flair. He sees Greek-Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, he says, in the winter light of his Spanish farming photos, and American artist Georgia O'Keeffe in the shapes that form in breaking glacial ice. Most of all, Franklin credits the Romantics and their idea "that these sublime landscapes are both beautiful but terribly precipitous." As the scene from Megalopoli reveals, change can be both stunning and haunting at the same time.