René Burri – Explosions of Sight

EVERYTHING, TERRIBLY

. . . Judge kindly when you compare us With those who were the very perfection of order We who are seeking everywhere for adventure We are not your enemies Who want to give ourselves vast strange domains Where mystery flowers into any hands that long for it Where there are new fires colours never seen A thousand fantasies difficult to make sense out of They must be made real All we want is to explore kindness the enormous country where everything is silent And there is time which somebody can banish or welcome home Pity for us who fight always on the frontiers Of the illimitable and the future Pity our mistakes pity our sins . . .

But laugh, laugh at me Men everywhere especially people from here For there are so many things that I don’t dare to tell you So many things that you would not let me say Have pity on me Guillaume Apollinaire, La Jolie Rousse1

MARC DONNADIEU

Like many Swiss, Burri was a regular mountain climber in his youth; and for him, the most exciting thing was ‘the view’. Exhilarated, he would let go of the rope and run the last few metres to the summit at full tilt, keen to admire the landscape and the new mountain chains that lay between him and a unique and fascinating view on the other side: ‘Finally discovering what lay behind.’ 2 However, he also claimed that being attached to a rope on a steep wall meant that he was saved more than once from a ‘chimney’, a narrow vertical cleft in a rock face, by a friend.3 For Burri, overcoming his fears and tackling risks head on in order to ramp up his taste for adventure and discover new horizons were not just a vade mecum for the perfect photojournalist, but the honing of an existence and an identity that would belong to him, even beyond the confines of Switzerland. Known for his resourcefulness, he hitchhiked his way to Paris in 1954, hopeful of meeting the great Picasso.

At just twenty-two, he travelled all over Europe; by the age of twenty-five, the Middle East held no more secrets for him – the same for Latin America, and at the age of thirty he achieved his first round-the-world trip. Even then, his enthusiasm and his curiosity about the world around him helped shape his individuality and success. But intrepid­ness and boldness alone were not the only things that created the photographer as we know him, although they did give wings to the child who spent hours, alone, poring over drawing paper or packing paper during the war 4 . . . ‘After I left the photography class,5 in which all we did was photograph coffee cups under the light, I had to chase after my images. How to position the device when everything was moving? When people walked, when everything galloped in front of me? I shouted at them to “Stay still!” This lasted until I started moving myself, until I managed to swim with the tide. Then, when I did manage it, the action was taking place on the other side of the street! Snaps are like taxis in the rush hour – if one isn’t fast enough, someone else will get them first.’ 6 Some years later, he refused to release the shutter if the image in his viewfinder seemed too easy, too literal or too picturesque, lacking distance, depth or perspective7; as if it wasn’t just a matter of recording information, but of interpreting a fact, an occurrence, imbuing it with meaning and value.

In other words, of expressing the reality, if not recording a truth.

ONE PHOTOGRAPHER? As Guido Magnaguagno says in his introduction to the catalogue of the One World exhibition,8 the first retrospective conceived and mounted by René Burri himself and his wife Rosellina Burri-Bischof covered more than thirty years of his career: ‘During what was 1

2 3

4 5 6 7 8

Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘La Jolie Rousse’, in Calligramme: Poèmes de la Paix et de la Guerre (1913–1916), Paris, Mercure de France, 1918, pp. 198–200. ‘La Jolie Rousse’ (‘The Pretty Redhead’), English version

by James Wright, from Collected Poems, Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Cf. https://www.goodreads.com/ book/show/1012923.Collected_Poems (accessed 13 September 2019).

Cited by Jacques Poget, in ‘Un Œil Nommé Burri’, L’Illustré, no. 6, 1985, pp. 56–57.

‘Nevertheless, something from my youth – mountaineering. I was climbing around on our mountains a lot back then; hanging off a steep wall by a rope, I was once rescued from a “chimney” by a friend. The exciting thing about climbing for me was the view. I would run the last few metres to the summit, panting, and see ever-new mountain ranges spread out in front of me. It all had something to do with curiosity; I also felt like I had no fear of heights whatsoever.’ Translated from Du, no. 3, 1981, pp. 52–55.

Cf. Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, Paris, Phaidon, 2004, p. 13.

René Burri took Hans Finsler’s courses in photography at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich, where he enrolled in 1949, from 1950 to 1953.

René Burri, in ‘Moment!’, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, no. 43, 24 October 1997, p. 22.

Ibid., p. 24.

Zurich, Kunsthaus, 14 January–11 March 1984; Paris, Centre national pour la photographie, 25 May– 30 July 1984; Milan, Contemporary Art Pavilion, 6 December 1984–7 January 1985; Lausanne, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, 8 February–14 April 1985.

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Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church destroyed during the War and never repaired, West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany, 1959 Gelatin silver bromide print Vintage print 20 × 30 cm

Solar furnace of Odeillo, Basque Country, France, 1957 Gelatin silver bromide print Vintage print 16.5 × 24 cm

almost an archaeological dig into his huge archives, it wasn’t just his life that resurfaced: Burri also discovered some photos that suddenly seemed more significant than others that had been published many times. Doubt set in – was this book, this resumé really worth making?’ 9 For a photojournalist sent constantly to the outposts of history at the request of the leading newspapers and magazines of the time, what was the point of a retrospective look at his work? Surely the only picture that counts is the one that he will make a second later? Burri’s response was: ‘I have always thought of myself as a permanently working photographer. In my work I do not distinguish between the professional and the private domains. Generally, I start with a specific commission but, on the sidelines, I often take photographs for my own use. These photographs turned up one fine day, alongside my professional work. I am glad that my work, my life and my artistic ambitions can now make up a single unit.’ 10 All the same, he clarified: ‘As a photographer, I led a double life: one in black and white; the other in colour.’ 11 These apparent divisions between the different activities of a photojournalist may surprise many; the working professional must confront the lines between responses to a ‘commission’ and ‘personal’ images, black-and-white photographs and colour photographs, which are more blurred than they might seem. His archives reveal the considerable number of commissioned images in Die Deutschen (The Germans)12 which Burri nevertheless presented as one of his more ‘personal’ books, and many of his iconic colour images were also duplicated in black and white, and vice versa.13 Burri was therefore one and many, singular and plural, a unique individual and a citizen of the world, an independent photographer and a global chronicler, and, by reinventing himself constantly during his career, seen retrospectively the explosion of his eye now seems limitless.14 ‘When one really manages to capture the vibration of the living, then one can talk about “good photography”, photography that transports and is capable of taking the viewer on their own imaginary journey.’15 Burri was always driven by an irrepressible zest for life16 and a thirst for discovering the universe, but especially by an acute awareness of the ebb and flow of things,17 a tenacious desire to understand the workings of the world, and that certainty of then being able to share his experiences and his analyses with his peers.18 As Hans-Michael Koetzle underscores, his work is ‘to a large extent worldly, devoted to life, full of curiosity about other ways of life and cultures and their colour palettes. It also shows a distinct degree of political interest . . . A social, political, and historical message almost always resonates . . .

Knowing the background information of the photographs immediately increases their socio-political charge.’19 Two parallel approaches can be distinguished in René Burri, and it is precisely these that Koetzle highlights: on the one hand the composition, the structure 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

René Burri One World: Photographies et Collages, 1950–1983, Rosellina Burri-Bischof and Guido ­Magnaguagno (ed.), Berne, Benteli, 1984 (Photographie Suisse, 3), p. 17.

René Burri, in Bryn Campbell, World Photography, New York, Optimum Books, 1981, p. 113, cited by Guido Magnaguagno, op. cit., p. 17.

Cited on the back cover of the book Impossible Reminiscences, Paris, Phaidon, 2013.

René Burri, Die Deutschen, Zurich, Fretz & Wasmuth, 1962; the French edition, Les Allemands, was published

by Robert Delpire in Paris, in 1963.

Like his mentor, Werner Bischof.

‘But magical things can happen in these situations, when at the right moment you dare to go beyond the limitations.’ René Burri, in Impossible Reminiscences, op. cit., n. p.

In René Burri One World, op. cit., p. 163.

Cf. Hans-Michael Koetzle, ‘Le Monde encore une fois…,’ in René Burri, Arles, Actes Sud, 2004 (‘Photo Poche’, 99), n. p.

The famous ‘swimming with the tide’ in his early photographic work.

Cf. Anselm Zurfluh, Introduction to the book René Burri Utopia, Pregny, Editions de Penthes, 2013, pp. 4–5.

Hans-Michael Koetzle, ‘On Colour in the Work of René Burri’, in Impossible Reminiscences, op. cit., n. p.

MARC DONNADIEU

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and the visual impact are of indisputable economy, precision and legibility, conferring on them a symbolic character, universal and almost eternal;20 on the other, each sign, each shape, each frame within the image confers an original and personal – if not subjective – perspective on what is portrayed. What they represent for us – or what Burri makes them represent – is a good deal more than they actually show.21 The uniqueness of Burri’s visual universe, whether in response to a commission or for more personal work, whether in black-and-white or in colour, is founded on the complementarity – the dialogue, almost – between these two approaches, their superposition and their osmosis, perhaps.22 His photographs also hold the page or the picture rails of a gallery like no others, and have the unique power to reveal each situation to us in a single photogram23 – as Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, said: ‘One picture is worth a thousand words’ . . . in other words, boil down the evidence and the complexity of things, if not their tension, into a single photograph.

For Burri, however, the more reality was turned on its head or divided, the more it stimulated and fascinated him. This is what he had to say about his book Die Deutschen: ‘Germany, then, was simply the place where, after the war, certain fracture lines were more strongly apparent . . . That was what impelled me to . . . go to the precise place where the opposing factions were inflamed and entered into conflict’; 24 it is also true that Germany was his mother’s birthplace.25 The book, which came out in Switzerland in 1962 – in other words a year after the Berlin Wall was built – and then in France the following year,26 describes better than any other, ‘life in the East, as in the West, the city and the flat landscape, the young and the old, the past and the present, the world of work and the world of leisure, the superiors and the inferiors, love and death, departures and memories, the old Germany and the new Germany’.27 In other words, the spirit, the life and the upheavals of a country that the tide of history has undermined and has transformed profoundly, like its fragile beauty and its tenacious hopes notwithstanding the schisms and the fissures. As a thirteen-year-old child, on finding out that Winston Churchill was to visit Zurich in the autumn of 1946, he had asked his father to lend him his Kodak camera28 so he could preserve the event for posterity. Did this future photographer – ­ 20

21 22

23

24 25

26 27 28

Leafing through any of René Burri’s books, it always comes as a surprise to come across one or more pictures that one hadn’t expected to find there, and that might have been taken almost anywhere, in any period, given their allegorical and symbolic meaning, and which have now entered into our collective imagination.

‘He has . . . summarized the future of the world in parabolic-seeming iconographic formulas.’ ­Hans-Michael Koetzle, ‘Le Monde encore une fois…’, op. cit., n. p.

‘His photography is personal without being confidential, attached to form without being formalist, subjective without being gratuitous, often reassuring, never decorative.’ Hans-Michael Koetzle, ‘On Colour in the Work of René Burri’, op. cit., n. p.

‘René Burri’s best photos are always symbols. They show not just a moment, but also portray a society and an era. Besides which, they also often come about thanks to the courage of the photographer in not simply dealing with a subject of general interest, but of turning around, to look about himself and home in on the actors of life [. . .]’, Manfred Papst, La Revue des Suisses de l’Etranger, no. 5, October 2013, pp. 18–21.

René Burri, ‘René Burri: Die Unbekannten Deutschen’, Leica World, no. 1, 1997, p. 23.

Born in Fribourg-en-Brisgau in 1903, Bertha Haas left Germany when she was eighteen to work as a domestic and cook in Switzerland. In 1947, accompanied by her two children, his mother set out with her children to visit her relatives who still lived in Fribourg-en-Brisgau. After a long and tumultuous journey, they were met by the sight of a city entirely destroyed by bombs, including the cathedral, which shook the entire family. Cf. Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, op. cit., p. 22.

René Burri, Die Deutschen, op. cit.; Les Allemands, op. cit.

Hans-Michael Koetzle, ‘Le Monde encore une fois…’, op. cit., n. p.

Rudolf Otto Burri, who came from a family of twelve children and whose parents were restaurateurs, became a chef. He also developed a taste for opera, then for photography, which he practised regularly.

Cf. Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, op. cit., p. 13.

EVERYTHING, TERRIBLY

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who should have wanted to become a film director – know, or did he have a premonition that the ‘old lion’ was going to declaim his famous exhortation about the future of Europe: ‘Let Europe arise!’?

ONE WORLD? ‘While it’s unrealistic to think you can change the world, you can do your bit: it starts with children, people in your own orbit. Photography is nothing; it’s the way you feel and express yourself that is important. This means drawing attention to something, saying “look at this” – not exploiting it, but going beyond yourself – it’s sharing.’ 29 Thus, taking photographs means sharing a view of the world with the viewer, in order to open and amplify their understanding of the world around them. In this, Burri was absolutely a photojournalist for whom each successful image is destined to be seen and published, but equally an ‘author’ for whom each image must be exposed and interrogated. Hans Finsler, who taught him at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Zurich, had taught him that ‘a picture should not (just) be “made”, but (also) “taken” and “welcomed”’.30 His choice of cover for the book René Burri One World thus comes as little surprise.

It shows the window of a passport photographer’s studio in the town of Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1982 – both the simplest and the most necessary form of photography: making a ­portrait of another person so that the image testifies as to their identity. But, looking more closely at the picture, one can make out the arms of René Burri leaving his own portrait in among the mosaic of all the others; this is their world, but it’s equally his own.31 In 1956, Burri, true in this sense to the deep-rooted humanism that he shared with all the members of Magnum Photos, said: ‘The beauty of and the need for our profession is that we can break free of it from time to time to devote ourselves to events and places that interest us more personally. These days when, from morning to evening, the clicking shutters of cameras sound all over the world and when the daily consumption of films can be measured in kilometres, when continents are photographed from every possible angle and in every corner, published by the illustrated papers and conserved in film cans and film strips, the question of our mission arises again for us young photographers. More than ever, across history, the problems facing rice-planters in China, workers in American car factories and German miners are ultimately the same. The considerable social transformations of our technical age also have repercussions on music, painting, literature and architecture and lend a new “face” to modern man. Discovering it, transmitting this face and some of his thoughts, that’s what I see as my duty’ 32 (ill. p. 164). To some extent, what he conveys through each of his photographs is the gift of a face, the gift of a look,33 so that others can, in return, see themselves in a more honest, more intense and more vibrant way.

Three years later, in Athens, Burri realised once and for all that photographers could no longer fight against the speed of television and its ability to retransmit an event 29 30 31

32 33

René Burri, in Impossible Reminiscences, op. cit., n. p.

Hans-Michael Koetzle, ‘Le Monde encore une fois…’, op. cit., n. p.

Presented as ‘the largest photographic exhibition of all time’, the famous exhibition Family of Man, thought up and conceived in the early 1950s by the photographer Edward Steichen, who René Burri met while studying at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in January 1955. It then travelled round the world, stopping in Berlin in 1955, and in Paris and Tokyo in 1956. In some ways, as a result of this coverage, René Burri also enrolled voluntarily – symbolically – as a member of the ‘great family of mankind’.

René Burri, Camera, no. 7, July 1956, p. 304.

According to Martine Franck’s brilliant formula.

MARC DONNADIEU

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almost instantaneously.34 Their job, therefore, had to change completely: ‘Good photography thus depends on my presence, my way of observing, perceiving things, having a rapport with the things that surround me. What counts, is to transmit this intensity through the photograph, to add something that one has experienced. Otherwise it is simply a document,’ 35 said Burri, the astute pioneer. It was therefore not merely a question of simply arranging the world in his viewfinder, but actually a question of really making the image come alive on a magazine page, and making it live and vibrate in the eyes of the reader.

ONE SOUL? As a child, Burri collected stamps from all over the world.36 By the end of a career spanning almost sixty years, he had immortalised thousands of anonymous people, accompanied some of the most important artists, architects and writers of his time, pointed his lens at the leading directors or politicians who shaped the history of the second half of the twentieth century, witnessed almost all the conflicts, crises, clashes and important events that shook the planet. Thus, at times at some risk to his own life,37 he was in Czechoslovakia during the mid-1950s, witnessing the Prague Spring and later the collapse of commu­ nism; in Korea as war broke out and at the controversial Olympic Games of the late 1980s; the closure and reopening of the Suez Canal; the heyday and the ruin of Lebanon . . .

Although Burri was not in Berlin in 1961 for the building of the Wall, he was there on 23 December 1989 to help bring it down among that intrepid, joyful crowd keen to regain its identity and its freedom, fired by a collective momentum. He also put together a documentary account of the United States’ victorious Space Race and the ruins left in its wake; on the cult of the motorcar and its decline; on the birth of Brasilia and its evolution over time. But at the end of the day: ‘For me, the camera has always been a magic wand that has allowed me to go to places where I have learnt new things.’ 38 Was it simply a case of ‘dis­ covering’ and ‘investigating things’? 39 Not really, since these new things that undoubtedly shaped his life have above all shaped our own, such as his famous portrait of Che Guevara smoking a cigar, which achieved global fame and which still, after more than fifty years, continues to galvanise young people searching for heroes who stand up to the measure of their hopes and their dreams of emancipation. Burri ‘is a photographer of vision who seeks out ideals and utopias. But is there such a thing as a utopia without a revolution?’ 40 René Burri should have been made a full member of Magnum Photos in 1958. However, he was deemed too young to achieve this status, despite the fact that he had been working for the agency for around three years.41 He therefore set off for Argentina in search of gauchos; his only knowledge of them was through a book by Ricardo Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra.42 He spent several weeks tirelessly searching for them and followed them like a shadow, closely observing their relationships with animals, with the land 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

‘In 1959, I was on my way back from Cyprus with my pictures of Archbishop Makarios III returning home.

I was at the hotel, tired, writing the captions for my photos. I looked at the television, and what did I see?

The events in Cyprus! I remember it was a shock, I got up, I felt a huge injustice; I shouted: “No! Stop, this story belongs to me, it’s in my camera, it’s for me to tell!” It was as if a train was galloping along next to me.’

Maria de Baleine, ‘René Burri. Le Cerveau suisse’, Grands Reportages, no. 67, February 1987, pp. 10, 20.

René Burri One World, op. cit., p. 163.

Cf. Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, op. cit., p. 108.

Ibid., pp. 28–29.

In Brigitte Ulmer, ‘Ich Dachte, Burri, Du Spinnst’, Cash Extra, no. 49, 5 December 1997, p. 68.

René Burri, cited by Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, op. cit., p. 109.

Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, op. cit., p. 32.

Ibid., pp. 140–141.

Ricardo Güiraldes, Don Segundo Sombra, Buenos Aires, Proa, 1926.

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and the sky, their hard, difficult, yet free and unconstrained life, a million miles from all the clichés about American cowboys, of course! . . . But Burri recorded their gestures, their looks and their sociability, in particular capturing what remained of a memory, a tradition and a heritage much older than themselves with empathy. The result was a photographic investigation bordering on the anthropological, which was published in the March 1959 edition of Du43 and certainly left its mark. Not long after, he finally became a full member of Magnum Photos. He then took just as much care over the publication of the book 44 with sketches and subsequent mock-ups, now carefully conserved in his archives.

René Burri firmly believed that humanity, despite its intrinsically disparate nature, had to learn to share the unique territory that is our world.45 Moreover, aside from a simple dialogue between cultures, he constantly pondered the make-up of our civilisation; about what brings us together rather than what splits us apart; about what we build together and for all people, rather than what we destroy in one fell swoop. His lengthy investigations sparked major, immediately published inquiries into his in-depth view of Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East in particular, of which he was a true connoisseur and a perspicacious observer. In other words, on the regions in which modernity perches – when it is not disavowed – on the religious, historic and cultural legacy that the tales, the traditions and the memories of the inhabitants often invoke. In 1963 he travelled to Israel and Jordan for Tokyo’s Sun magazine; 46 his pictures were published under the heading ln Search of the Holy Land.47 That same year, in a special edition of Paris Match on Pope Paul VI and his last-minute trip to the Holy Land, he published a twenty-two page series48 entitled Sur les Pas de Jésus. In 1967, he made a film in Israel, Jordan and Egypt on the three leading monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. During the summer of 1984, he travelled through Kenya, Israel and Egypt for an article entitled ‘Un Voyage de Huit Millions d’Années sur les Traces du Premier Homme’, which appeared in Libération. ‘The leaden atmosphere of this series of pictures lends a subterranean cohesion to their messages’;49 this could be true of any place and of any time,50 like the photograph of a shadow of a tree on a stony desert, which he took in Pakistan in 1963 (ill. p. 161), its presence and symbolism seemingly drawn from the depths of time. Burri appeared to be tackling the fractures of the past with an engaged and profoundly ­humanist approach, as if attempting to defuse the schisms, neutralise them even, as if he were trying to heal the fissures, if not sew them back together.

It is true that he had experienced the momentum of the years 1960–1970, those hopes for absolute equality and solidarity, that peaceful building of a future free at last from the rivalry of the great powers, but real life and geopolitical issues soon put a stop to such dreams and ideals. Burri himself, however, seemed still to cling to these dreams, the ones he drew as a child on sheets of paper, and then leafing through Life, the dreams of Burri the photojournalist, constantly chasing all over the globe in a bid to find out what was really going on,51 those of Burri the visionary photographer and filmmaker of the great 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Du, no. 7, March 1959, pp. 7–51.

René Burri, The Gaucho, New York, Crown Publishers, 1968.

Cf. Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, op. cit., p. 10.

Sun, no. 6, December 1963.

In Search of the Holy Land, Tokyo Sun, no. 6, December 1963.

Paris Match, no. 770, 11 January 1964.

Guido Magnaguagno, in René Burri One World, op. cit., p. 20.

Ibid.

The cry ‘Where is René?’ often went up in the Magnum Photos offices in Paris and New York. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s terse and definitive reply was: ‘On a plane.’ Guido Magnaguagno, in René Burri One World, op. cit., p. 17.

MARC DONNADIEU

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Du magazine, December 1993 Publication 33.1 × 23 cm El Che Painting on invitation card to the Rétrospective 1950–2000 in Rotterdam, 2005 15 × 21 cm

Photocollage created for the exhibition held in the Maison européenne de la photographie from14 January to 4 March 2004 Xerograph, torn paper and cigar box labels 24 × 28 cm

Out and about in Peking, China, 1964 Gelatin silver bromide print Contact sheet 27.5 × 23 cm

In 1964, René Burri finally sets foot in China, a territory that fascinates him. Like his mentor Werner Bischof a few years previously, he has already travelled around Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, and has visited Hong Kong. Among the Magnum Photos photographers, only Robert Capa in 1938, Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1948, 1949 and 1958, and Marc Riboud in 1957 have managed to cross the border to the People’s Republic of China, a country that is almost cut off from the rest of world. During his very first journey, he is invited to a First of May banquet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where he meets the Premier Zhou Enlai. Then he visits most of the historical sites, such as the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China.

In July, his daughter Yasmine is born, her name inspired by the jasmine flowers that he had seen in Asia. Nevertheless, he is back in China before the end of the year to make prepa­rations for a documentary film that he is booked to shoot the following year. All the images that he brings back from these visits in 1964 and 1965 grasp the essence of a thousand-year-old China via its particularly visually compelling landscapes, its monuments and statues, its street scenes, gestures and timeless expressions and its new youth, galvanised by political slogans, the pioneer spirit and the promise of a better future.

Given that René Burri has always been drawn by audacity and intrepidity, flamboyant destinies and men of power, he makes a point of travelling around the country to find Mao Zedong’s birthplace, an expedition that gives him a unique opportunity to observe the whole extent and diversity of the Chinese territory beyond the great cities, a China that is both rural and industrial, which has not yet been marked by the imminent Cultural Revolution. Thus, he visits metallurgical factories, cotton manufacturers, hospitals, maternity hospitals, village schools . . . Shot from 1 May 1965, working with his wife Rosellina Burri-Bischof, his film The Two Faces of China will be edited a few months later in New York, in his colleague Elliott Erwitt’s studio. An electrical blackout prevents him from working and gives birth to a series of images that are still famous: ‘Blackout in New York.’

Once back in Zurich, he presents his Chinese wanderings in the Form Gallery, the first of a very long list of personal shows in Switzerland and all over the world; the original prints are carefully conserved by the state. However, we have to wait until 1972, and his Behind the Great Wall of China: Photographs from 1870 to the Present exhibition, organised by the Metropolitan Museum of New York,1 for a definitive showing of his film to the widest possible public.

In 1985, almost twenty years after this, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Long March, he returns to China to carry out a long-anticipated project on this theme.2 ‘It was a magical voyage. By virtue of taking detours around rice paddies, obstacles and snowy zones, I was discovering the real China, which still existed to some extent.’3 In 1989, during the events in Tiananmen Square – which Burri witnessed although he didn’t take many pictures - many magazines resorted to reproducing some of the photos he had taken earlier to illustrate their commentaries and analytical articles; since then, these have become new icons.

1 2 3

This exhibition combined photographs by John Thomson, Edgar Snow, Nym Wales (Helen Foster Snow), Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud and René Burri.

Twenty years later, in 2004–2005, he returned to China yet again to tackle this subject, which he felt deeply about.

René Burri, in Impossible Reminiscences, op. cit., n. p.

FOCUS CHINA

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Hangzhou, China, 1964 Gelatin silver bromide print Vintage print 25.5 × 20 cm

This book is published to coincide with the exhibition René Burri – Explosions of Sight, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, from 29 January to 3 May 2020.

Published by the Musée de l’Elysée in collaboration with Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich Edited by Mélanie Bétrisey and Marc Donnadieu, curators of the exhibition, with the assistance of Jessica Mondego Research consultant: Werner Jeker, representative of the Fondation René Burri With contributions by Mélanie Bétrisey, Daniel Bischof, Clara Bouveresse, Marc Donnadieu, Julie Enckell Julliard, Tatyana Franck, Werner Jeker, Hans-Michael Koetzle and Bernard Plossu Graphic design: Studio Marie Lusa Translation into English: Bridget Mason, Sarah Tolley Copy editing and proofreading: Colette Forder, Elisha Aaron, Lisa Schons Director of the collection: Tatyana Franck Editorial coordination: Sylviane Amey Image editing and pre-press: Roger Emmeneger Printing: Genoud Arts graphiques SA Printed in December 2019 in Mont-sur-Lausanne © 2020 Musée de l’Elysée and Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich © for the texts, the authors © for the images, see image credits The selected biography of René Burri was edited by the Musée de l’Elysée on the basis of the longer one by Hans-Michael Koetzle for the book Photographies (Paris, Phaidon, 2004), reviewed and completed by the Fondation René Burri.

Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess Niederdorfstrasse 54 8001 Zurich Switzerland Scheidegger & Spiess is being supported by the Federal Office of Culture with a general subsidy for the years 2016–2020.

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trans­ mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

ISBN 978-3-85881-845-4 www.scheidegger-spiess.ch www.elysee.ch

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