For almost three years, there was one person you could expect to see at almost every Stop The Hate event – Elliott Franks, camera in hand.
Whether there were thousands marching through central London or a handful of us standing in the rain, Elliott was there.
Over time, he stopped feeling like a photographer who came to cover our events and simply became part of them. Part of us. That is what makes losing him so hard.
Stop The Hate has always been about showing up. Elliott understood that better than most because he always showed up too. Week after week, event after event, he stood alongside us, documenting moments of anger, defiance, solidarity and, sometimes, enormous joy.
And he caught those moments like nobody else.
So many of the photographs that tell the story of Stop The Hate were taken through Elliott’s lens. His pictures ran across the national press and travelled far beyond the people who were actually there.
He enabled us to be seen.
A protest lasts an hour or two. The right photograph travels around the world. Elliott’s pictures gave our campaigns a reach we could never have achieved alone. There are moments from the last three years that hundreds of thousands of people saw because Elliott was standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment.
But when we think about Elliott, it is not press coverage or campaigns that first come to mind. It is Elliott himself.
He was kind, charming and unfailingly lovely. He became one of those familiar faces you simply expected to see. Amid all the noise and intensity that surround our events, seeing Elliott was reassuring. There he was again, smiling, saying hello and, inevitably, producing the best photographs of the day.
Because Stop The Hate has never just been a campaign. It is a community. A family, built out of people who keep turning up for one another, in good times and in hard ones. Elliott was a big part of that family.
You do not realise how deeply someone is woven into a family until they are no longer there.
At our next event, many of us will look around and expect to see him. The gap he leaves will be felt by everyone.
Elliott leaves us an extraordinary record of what we have done together. Photographs of moments we will never recreate, of people standing together, of campaigns that mattered, and of a community refusing to be silent. Those photographs will mean even more to us now.
Elliott spent almost three years capturing our memories. In the process, he became part of them.
We will miss him terribly, and we will always be grateful for everything he gave us. May his memory be a blessing.
Yochy Davis and Itai Galmudy are co-founders of Stop The Hate UK
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