Trees give Stuart Franklin his subject, but memory gives him his method. In Traces, the Magnum photographer moves between the walnut forests of Kyrgyzstan and the root systems that grip Angkor Wat, from gum-marked trees in Mexico to the old olives of the Mediterranean littoral, before returning to some of the oldest trees in England and Wales. The book’s final note is one of recovery, turning to the elm in Europe and the ash in Britain.

What distinguishes the project is Franklin’s refusal to treat trees as pure scenery. Their presence or absence, he suggests, is rarely separable from human history and human intervention. The pictures therefore occupy a hybrid ground between nature and society, and between landscape and recollection: they look outward at terrain that can feel sublime or quietly haunted, and inward at the associations that strange, crooked forms revive. That double movement gives the sequence its tension, and it is articulated in an extended essay by Franklin himself, with supporting texts from the sculptor David Nash and Martin Barnes, Senior Curator in Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The publisher’s catalogue describes 244 pages and 170 duotone and colour photographs, in a hardback volume of roughly 29 by 24.8 centimetres. It is a substantial object for a body of work that depends on both the sweep of a place and the particularity of bark and branch. For collectors drawn to landscape photography that treats memory as a working problem rather than a mood, Traces offers a considered, geographically wide-ranging body of pictures by a photographer whose career spans reportage and long-form observation, and it gathers his thinking on the subject in his own words.