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The name René Burri is synonymous with some of the most iconic black and white portraits of the 20th Century, from Che Guevara smoking his signature cigar to Ingrid Bergman on set. A Magnum photographer, his photojournalism encompassed most of the major political events and figures of the past 50 years including Castro, Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan and Churchill, but it was his shots of Le Corbusier, Yves Klein, Giacometti and Picasso that revealed the sensitive eye of a fine art photographer who had his own and very modern way of seeing things. His mastery of the camera is more than a meticulously trained eye, but an existential awareness that what you see depends very much on where you are standing.
It is in his colour shots, taken in parallel to his black and white oeuvre spanning 50 years, that his incredible gift of framing the perfect composition without losing the subtle humanity and pathos of a situation finds it’s most vivid expression. They are a playful reminder that reality is a layered composite of multiple perspectives, which has prompted Phaidon to publish Impossible Reminiscences, dedicated exclusively to his colours.
The 136 photographs in the book (each reproduced as full page plates) are like a narrative in colour, the layout has its own sequential logic and cleverly they are contextualised with an afterward from curator Hans-Michael Koetzle who places Burri’s colour oeuvre within a cultural, historical and photographic framework. “Burri welcomes ambiguity and steers clear of all the too obvious. He used colour in a way that is not anecdotal or simplistically eye catching. He uses it like an artist would in contemporary painting and balances colours out with great sensitivity and skill,” says Koetzle.
#129 is like a modern masterpiece with its floating blocks of colour. Taken from the air this urban scene captures the red square of a picnic mat on the roof top balanced by the triangle of a yellow taxi hitting the yellow lines in the street below. Burri uses colour to punctuate the layers of depth, the fields of vision and often a dual perspective (shadow guns on yellow plastic in #94, a monk’s robe #95, or the spill of yellow powder that covers a workers shoes # 96) all converging to make it a seminal modern image.
The book ends with valuable insight into the artist’s mind as he annotates each frame with personal recollections of the moment. Burri’s reminiscence of #20 says it all, “At first sight this picture is a mystery. The shapes above the building look like icebergs but they were fragments of glass in the window that were stuck together with Sellotape. The office block was empty and felt like being in an aviary: Beirut’s aviary.” His eye is poetic and his considered image simultaneously captures the immediate absurdity of the situation and the wider tragedy from which it comes.
In #60 taken from the air a blown up tank that looks like a camera makes you consider the art and the purpose of photojournalism, the voyeuristic aspect on death: the camera taking the final shot. His seminal image #18 shows a cityscape through a square curtained hole in a fresco of River Jordan. “Blasted through during an Israeli invasion afterwards, people draped curtains around the hole and it became a piece of art.”
What strikes me most about this statement is his lack of ownership of the piece of art he has just created in his own composition. ‘Especially in his colour shots do we see game – he made seeing itself the subject, put perception to the test and developed his own way of dealing with expressive medium of colour long time before colour photography gained its artistic absolution in the 70s, I found myself asking: how did he get there? His photography reminds us that what we see all depends on where we are standing, both physically and metaphorically: #41 inside the barbed wire, #20 plastic icebergs, #105 the travelling red square. It is perhaps this questioning that has driven him to continuously develop and evolve his ways of seeing, and why his colour photographs are so extraordinary in their breadth of subject and depth of vision.
Most importantly they are a potent reminder that in life, you only get one shot.
by Nico Kos Earle
Impossible Reminiscences (£69.95) is published by Phaidon on the occasion of René Burri 80th birthday