DEAR FRANKLIN
By Kurt Tong
Published by Editions Xavier Barral
Paris, 2022
Somewhere between journalism, documentary, and historical fantasy, Kurt Tong’s genre-defying Dear Franklin (2022) reimagines the boundaries of a photography book. Its origin story is perhaps as unique as the book itself: after being instructed to collect a Taoist-talisman sealed trunk in 2018 from his friend’s deceased neighbor, Tong was thrust into the mysterious world of its contents. Handwritten letters, old analogue photographs, vintage magazines, and dusty notebooks—all belonging to the allusive Franklin Lung and his fiancee Dongyu—portray snippets of a life destroyed by the grand flux of history.
A tragic, drawn-out love affair dominates the majority of book’s narrative, while the rest explicates the Japanese occupation’s catastrophic impacts on China and fascism’s concurrent rise in Europe. To his credit, Tong refrains from banaltiy, seamlessly weaving together historical records from the 1930 and ’40s with fictional events and contemporary photographs,is printed on a slightly narrower page than the rest, allowing contextual documents such as newspaper clippings, war photographs, and vintage advertisements to literally frame Franklin’s narrative.
