Stuart Franklin was born in Britain in 1956. He received a B.A. in Photography and Film at West Surrey College of Art and Design and a B.A. and Ph.D. in Geography at the University of Oxford. During the 1980s, he worked as a correspondent for Sygma Agence Presse in Paris before joining Magnum Photos in 1985. Franklin is best known for his celebrated photograph of a man defying a tank in Tiananmen Square, China, in 1989, which won a World Press Photo Award. Since 1990, Franklin has completed over 20 assignments for National Geographic. His documentary photography has taken him to Central and South America, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Since 2004, he has focused on long-term projects concerned primarily with man and the environment. Franklin's books include The Time of Trees (1999), Hôtel Afrique (2007), Saint-Petersburg (2012), and The Documentary Impulse (2016). With a grant funded by the National Trust, he published Sea Fever, a documentary project about the British coastline, in 2005. Franklin was awarded a professorship in documentary photography in 2016 and was the general chair of the World Press Photo Jury in 2017. In 2021, Franklin won the Medical Journalists' Association Feature of the Year Award for his 2020 story on Covid-19 in the Sunday Times Magazine.

John Jacob is the McEvoy Family Curator for Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has been director of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University; director of Legacy Programs at the Magnum Foundation, New York; and director of the Inge Morath Foundation, New York. Jacob’s books include Inge Morath: First Color (2009), Man Ray: Trees + Flowers - Insects Animals (2009), and 2012’s Kodak Girl: From the Martha Cooper Collection, all published by Steidl. Recent exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. include Welcome Home: A Portrait of East Baltimore, 1975–1980 (2021), New on View: Dawoud Bey and William H. Johnson (2020), Trevor Paglen: Sites Unseen (2018), Diane Arbus: A Box of Ten Photographs (2018), and Harlem Heroes: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten (2016).