Dear Franklin
By Kurt Tong
Published by Éditions 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 fiancée Dongyu—portray snippets of a life destroyed by the grand flux of history.