Stuart Franklin - View to the Pudong New Area from the Yangpu Bridge. China. Shanghai. 1993

Stuart Franklin. View to the Pudong New Area from the Yangpu Bridge. China. Shanghai. 1993.

'Copyright 2005 Stuart Franklin / Magnum Photos / Contrasto' at the lower right corner. Total dimensions: 42,0 x 29,7 cm on semi-gloss paper. Good condition. Printed Lated, 2000's.

In this 1993 photograph, Stuart Franklin captures Shanghai at a moment of vertiginous transition —a city rising, mutating, stretching itself skyward. From an elevated vantage point, the viewer looks down onto an unfinished bridge, its deck suspended like a raw incision through a dense forest of concrete blocks and skeletal high-rises.

Tiny human figures move across the structure, dwarfed by the scale of the city around them. The cables slice the frame into taut verticals, turning the urban landscape into a grid of tension, ambition, and transformation. Franklin’s composition fuses monumental engineering with the fragile presence of everyday life, revealing the choreography between human scale and the machinery of modernisation.

A member of Magnum Photos since 1985, Franklin is widely recognised for his ability to move between the intimate and the monumental. From the iconic Tiananmen Square images to his long-form documentary projects across Europe, Asia, and Africa, his photography explores the intersections of political change, urbanisation, and human resilience.

This Shanghai scene is emblematic of his approach: meticulous structure, atmospheric depth, and a quiet poetry that emerges from the collision of people and place.

Stuart Franklin stands alongside photographers such as Raymond Depardon, Martin Parr, Ian Berry, Alex Webb, and Patrick Zachmann —authors who documented the pulse of rapidly changing societies with precision, curiosity, and a deeply human eye.

A striking piece for collectors of urban, architectural, and documentary photography —a moment where a city’s future is still scaffolding, steel, and possibility.