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DEEP FOCUS
For close to 70 years, RenĂŠ Burri has been capturing the life and lives around him, one moment at a time.
by lary wallace / photographs by tanapol kaewpring
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t was a special kind of luck that put René Burri down in the dirt that day in Spain, beaten and bloodied, another victim of Francisco Franco’s counter-revolutionaries come undone. He’d been there to photograph a parade, and the parade just ran right over him. But it was a special kind of luck, because it allowed Burri to eventually encounter the man he’d been pursuing for nearly seven years. This was 1957. Burri was still in his mid-twenties, mad to meet and to photograph Pablo Picasso, an artist whose work had inspired Burri for so long and from so far away. Except that sometimes it wasn’t very far at all, geographically – even if, practically, it might as well have been entire worlds that separated the two. Like the first time he’d tried to meet Picasso, some six years earlier. He hitchhiked to Paris, and every day he’d go knock on Picasso’s door, whereupon the secretary would tell Burri he needed an appointment, and Burri would go away until next time. After about a week of this, Burri determined it was not an effective strategy. “It’s okay,” he said to himself, determined as ever. “I know what I want.” Shortly after that, he met Picasso’s art dealer, in Switzerland at a showing of Picasso’s work. Burri handed over a book of his own art – of his photographs – and asked if the dealer would pass it along to Picasso. The dealer did so. But then, Burri was told, Picasso had lost it. Back at his hotel after being trampled by Franco’s parade, Burri was packing his things for a hasty escape from
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Spain. He took some time out to clean his nose and let it dry. While sitting there, he saw a newspaper announcing Picasso’s recent and forthcoming presence at the bullfights. Burri got in his car and drove all night to Picasso’s hotel, fuelling himself with coffee. When he got there, he asked, “Where’s Picasso?” At Picasso’s room, a lady welcomed him, telling him, “Everybody is here.” And sure enough, there was Picasso, sitting on the bed and playing to a large party of revelers by mimicking the motions of a bullfighter. With Picasso’s assent, Burri got his snaps. “Thank you, Maestro,” he said, leaving. Back in his room, he slept, waking many hours later, in the evening, all of his clothes still on, Leica resting soundly on his chest. He remarked to himself upon the fantastic dream he believed he’d just had in which he met Picasso. Downstairs in the hotel, he ran into Picasso’s oldest son, Paulo, ten years older than Burri himself, who recognised Burri and said he was needed at dinner. When he arrived, it looked like The Last Supper in there. Picasso, apparently, was superstitious, and had dispatched Paulo to find a fourteenth diner. The next day, they all went to the bullfights together. nd now, on this perfect Saturday afternoon in March, Burri is able to look back over it all, wistful and proud, from the patio of his colonial suite at the Dhara Dhevi luxury resort. He’s come to Chiang Mai for a career-
Papa,” Paulo said, “I found one. It’s the photographer. ” “Sit down,” said Picasso. “Eat.
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The Rolls-Royce of cameras,” he calls his Leica. It has the old classic, boxy design, but with digital capabilities. spanning exhibition of his work, “René Burri: The Iconic Photographs,” put on by the Projecto Group. The Picasso photos will be there, along with those of Churchill and Che, Nasser and Nixon; landscapes and cityscapes; actors and authors and artists and architects; as well as obscure, ordinary folk just going about the business of living in the 20th century. Picasso may have been superstitious, but Burri is not, not particularly. He believes in luck, but he believes, most of all, that luck is something one either exploits or fails to exploit, and that the matter of whether one exploits it is determined by deliberate preparation. “Luck – you cannot wait for it,” he says. “It happens sometimes, or you say, ‘Oh, whoa, whoa,’” he adds,flailing his arms around helplessly. “You have to shoot back like a sharpshooter. But it’s also a combination of what you know, because in that moment, either you can pack in some of your thinking and feeling, or the thing is gone. And then the luck leads to nothing.” Burri was intent upon his luck leading to something, and that’s why he’s sitting out here in the sun now, about to be feted at a dinner in his honour and then, tomorrow, guided through a curated exhibit containing the photographic evidence of his remarkable knack for meeting luck halfway. He’s relaxing at the table out here on the deck, barefoot in white Capri trousers and a turquoise polo. Wrapped snugly about his throat is a scarf of gauze-like density to meet the heat, and on his head is one of his cherished
Stetson Panamas. His digital Leica M8 hangs at his neck, or, alternatively, is slung rakishly over one knee. Spontaneously during our interview, as if by long-nurtured impulse, he picks up his camera, rotates it 45 degrees, and, peering through the viewfinder, captures my portrait. ené Burri began photographing well before he acquired his first Leica. The photograph of Winston Churchill to be featured in the exhibit is the first he ever took, doing so at age 13 at his father’s insistence. “He gave me his Kodak and said, ‘This man is very important.’ So I went there [to witness Churchill’s motorcade through Zurich] and took a picture. That was ’46. I had no idea that I would ever do photography. But it was this unconscious, great stroke. I just took one picture. I got into this without any real training in photojournalism, but you learn very quickly.” He still hadn’t decided on photography as his life’s primary pursuit. “I always wanted just to do films,” he says, “but Switzerland was far away from Hollywood or even French studios. When I was 17, I was at art school, not even knowing what to do – painting and the whole thing. And they said, ‘Boy, let’s decide what you want to do.’ And so they showed us the different classes. In art school you have architecture, you have classic design. I had seen some of the French films. I wanted to express emotion, you know? But then they showed me the photo
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school, and it looked like a little film studio. I studied for four years there, doing right from the beginning some films. But I had to learn photography, you know?” After graduation, he received a fellowship to study some more at the film school. It was then that he began receiving his first professional jobs. A cinematographer from Disney came to town, contracted to do a film about Switzerland, and Burri became his assistant for a year, working on one of the first ever films to be shot in CinemaScope. He soon began doing some documentaries of his own. “I liked it,” he says. “I loved to do the filming myself. In some of these films, I almost lost my shirt. Filming was great, but it required so much energy. I realised I wanted to do the same thing in photography – to lift up and go behind something.” That’s when he bought his first Leica. In 1955, when working at a graphic-design firm, Burri stepped out to photograph Le Corbusier, on spec, at his offices in Paris. Le Corbusier, then in his twilight, had just completed the Notre Dame du Haut and had already achieved legendary status as architect and urban planner. Burri captured an array of images depicting La Corbusier still very much hard at work. Here he is directing earnest young members of his staff amidst an office full of disarrayed blueprints – rolled-up, foldedup, hanging off of desks, or simply laid out on the drafting tables where they’re being worked on. Or consulting with Dominican monks on the grounds of what was to become
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the Sainte Marie de La Tourette priory. There is even a photo of Le Corbusier’s work table, shot from above, that manages to come alive with the varied abundance of its utilitarian detail. These pictures are what got Burri in with Magnum Photos, the international agency, which he’s been affiliated with in some form or another ever since. urri first came to Thailand in 1961, and he remarks today on the incredible changes he’s seen occur, episodically, in each of his visits since. In some places, the changes are more subtle than in others. “Bangkok,” he says, “has completely changed.” Five decades ago, he travelled to the island of Koh Samui and took black-and-white photos of monks, monkeys, beaches, bulls, coconuts, cockfights, schoolchildren, and palm trees. These photos, taken together, convey something essential about life on the Thai islands. Their uncanny composition – their depth of focus and feel for symmetry – give them the quality of fine art. There is one of melon farmers toiling beneath the river’s morning mist, backgrounded by a row of palm trees and then, further still and buttressing the entire image, the terminal hills beyond. There is a colour image – relatively rare in Burri’s oeuvre – of the beach at twilight, the descending sun creating a glow in the watery grooved places of the sand, which alternate
Burri first came to Thailand in 1961, and he remarks today on the incredible changes he’s seen occur.
with the elevated rolls still darkened by impending night. Burri still remembers the first time he was told, pointedly and directly, to photograph in colour. “In 1958, I proposed a story on Argentina. They said, ‘You must bring back some colour.’ I was annoyed, because the sky was too blue, the grass was too green. But I brought [the photos] back, and from that moment on, I had a second camera.” One for colour and, always, one for black-and-white. “When the magazines started turning to colour,” he remembers, “I said to myself, ‘Well, I don’t have time to start inventing a colour style.’ But I put the colour film in and had a good run with colour photography. They’re two completely different things.” His propensity for both blackand-white and colour he describes as “almost a little schizophrenic,” but no one would ever come away from a representative René Burri show believing he preferred the latter. He’s always chafed at the idea of a fixed identity, whether imposed from without or within. “At the beginning of my career, they couldn’t nail me down. I didn’t want to have a style. Like Picasso, I had several styles. But at the end now,” he says, referring to the retrospectives he’s been doing of late, “I’m bringing things together.” e’s at work on a book now, except that unlike his other books it will be comprised largely of text. That’s only appropriate, when you consider the subject: the photo not taken. It will be about 30 of the times when he could have
taken a picture but didn’t, and why, and what it all means. It promises, if done correctly, to be absolutely fascinating. There was this one time, pretty early in his career, when he could have photographed Greta Garbo. She was right there. But it wasn’t a public function, and the idea of becoming paparazzi was always more than a little distasteful to Burri, who’d made a conscious choice not to be that way. “I couldn’t get the Leica up,” he says. “It was such a magical thing. I couldn’t even do it.” And then there were those times when he took the photo even if, perhaps, he shouldn’t have. There are many of those, but none more ill-advised than the time he followed President Nasser of Egypt and his entourage into a Hilton elevator. As the door closed, the bodyguards reached for their guns, but Burri was faster on the draw: he’d already gotten his shot before they could react. Ten storeys later, the elevator doors opened. The bodyguards stood with their guns drawn. As Burri stepped out of the elevator, Nasser slapped him approvingly on the back, as if in benediction, and all the bodyguards put their pistols away. The head bodyguard got in Burri’s face and said, “Don’t you ever do that again!” before giving Burri his own slap on the back, but not in benediction. Burri promised he wouldn’t, patting the bodyguard where his gun rested in its holster. anger was always a part of the job. There was danger involved in the single most famous, most iconic
He’s always chafed at the idea of a fixed identity, whether imposed from without or within.
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All of a sudden my driver shouted, 'Stop!' And I looked: I was standing in the middle of a minefield.
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images Burri ever took, even if he didn’t know it till after the images had been taken. These were the ones he got of Che Guevara. After the photos were safely in Burri’s camera, but before Burri was safely out of Cuba, Che had a message he wanted Burri to give to a mutual acquaintance of theirs, a fellow photographer for Magnum named Andrew St. George, who had been a member of Che’s revolution before turning disloyal. “Tell your friend Andy,” Che said, not knowing the two were barely even acquainted, “that when I see him,” and here Burri draws a finger slowly over his throat, before adding that the incident left him “shaken.” Besides Che, he’s met many men who set out to change the world on a large scale but inevitably ended up changing themselves much more, and not for the better. Muammar Gaddafi, he insists, had been “a nice chap” when he met him, “a young [military] officer who had just deposed his king.” Then he got power and he became a monster. So, later on, Burri tended to stay away from the world leaders, “the arrogant SOBs,” and he tended to stay away, too, from the wars they made. But not always. Once, while doing a story on the Palestinians, “down near the border of Israel, I’d gotten out of the car, and all of a sudden my driver shouted, ‘Stop!’ And I looked: I was standing in the middle of a minefield.” Burri very carefully walked backward in his own footsteps.
“There is a tension [war photographers] have to live with which I didn’t need,” he says. “I was interested more in what happened before or afterwards, or the tragedies around it.” Often the tragedies involved the correspondents themselves, and Burri has known several who have died, in Vietnam and elsewhere. “Today, there is such a fetishisation of violence,” Burri says. “But there is another way of showing people, and that’s what I tried to do.” omorrow will begin his 18th international exhibition in just the last ten years. There will be a lunch in his honour, where media types and other invited parties will ask Burri questions. He will reminisce about getting inside Alberto Giacometti’s studio, photographing what was sculpted there, and how. A young visual artist will volunteer as to how he never lets anyone inside his own workspace, to which Burri will reply, “Then you are a Stalinist!” He is joking, yes, but there is an edge to his humour, discernible to anyone familiar with his beliefs about political extremists, not to mention photographic access. Photographic access is what gave him his life. Sometimes he had to seize his access, but most often it was granted, albeit only after contact had been established and a relationship nurtured. Out on the patio now, he talks about all this, deliberately and often meanderingly, in a voice wheezy and wizened with age. He talks so much, in fact, that his ice-cream sundae melts in its dish,
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and when a waitress comes to take it away, Burri gently stops her, saying, “I’ll still take it. Even if it melts.” “If I hadn’t had the camera,” he says, “I probably would have gone crazy, or become a thief or something. I used it as a weapon to push away the unbearable thing of seeing the time go. What I can say is that through this, I got some pictures that tell something about people, about history, about children, about women. And when I look at it, I find now some images, all these moments, and I can recall them.” He’s already done all the work for his next show, which will be in Paris in the fall. Its theme will be “Movement,” perhaps Burri’s favourite theme of all, the one that he believes best captures the essence of what photography is about. Photography is also, ideally, about revealing something heretofore concealed. It’s about going beyond the main event, behind the scenes or way out abroad, far beyond the realm of where others have thought to look for transcendent truth. “Why did I go to Australia or Timbuktu?” he asks rhetorically. “Because I’d seen a picture or read a story about it that made me want to go. And I think that’s what [photographers can] do – maybe without knowing, inspire some people to go beyond what they probably thought they could do. So, young photographers: go and do it, look behind, put your nose in.” And this: “Come back with some pictures you are proud of.” He’s proud of the photos he himself has taken, but, that said, none of them hang in either his Switzerland
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home or his Paris office. When asked why, he seems to consider the question too silly to require any answer beyond a “Why should I?” There is in fact one photo of his that hangs on a wall at home, of Che Guevara, but that’s only “because a friend of mine made an incredible [painted] frame around it.” Maybe he doesn’t hang his works at home because it would make him feel retired, and a true photographer never retires. “A good photographer never quits,” he says. “I use the camera now like a notebook. Continuously when I travel now, I take notes…. In fifty years, we should be able to say, ‘That’s how people lived,’ and not just imagine these things.” He is not sternly disapproving of the capricious photographic habits that cellphone cameras have inspired, and indeed will prove it at tomorrow’s luncheon, when he takes a picture of the shrimp and foie gras and petit fours on his very own plate, just like all the amateurs do. “What I say to people now who have cellphones is, ‘Go and take pictures of your children, your grandmother – take some snaps, because this moment will never come back.’” And maybe that’s why he doesn’t bother to hang his own work on his walls. Maybe it’s because he understands, as he’s always understood, that this moment is the one that matters most, the one that needs to be attended to the most, because it’s the one moment that can still be captured, and will never return unless it is.
Go and take pictures of your children, your grandmother – take some snaps, because this moment will never come back.
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