René Burri
Overview
René Burri studied design and composition, and worked as a documentary filmmaker before turning to photography during military service. He first made contact with Magnum in 1955, through Werner Bischof, when his first reportage, on deaf-mute children, was published in Life and other European magazines. Henri Cartier-Bresson famously sent Burri away to work on a defining body of work. The resulting photographic-essay, made over a six-month period, was a photographic poem on the life of the Gauchos on the Argentinian Pampas, which cemented his membership of Magnum in 1959, when Burri was 26. His curiosity and humanity has gained him almost unrestricted access to the major events and personalities of the last sixty years. Burri is admired and respected by his peers for his telling and cerebral photo-essays and social commentaries, all made with his characteristically sympathetic and human eye. Among his most well-known works are “Men on a Rooftop, São Paulo, 1960” and his classic portrait of Che Guevara puffing on a cigar, which have become two of the most celebrated photographic images of the twentieth century.

São Paulo, Brazil, 1960
Gelatin silver print

Exercising, Fort Lauderdale, 1966
Gelatin silver print

Former Summer Palace, Dead Lotus Flowers on the Kunming Lake, Beijing, China, 1964
Gelatin silver print

Caravan, United Arab Emirates, 1975
Gelatin silver print

Wild Horses, Argentina, 1968
Gelatin silver print

Ernesto Guevara (Che), Ministry of Industry, Havana, 1963
Gelatin silver print

Landscape, Brasilia, 1960
Gelatin silver print

Pablo Picasso, Bullfight, Nîmes, France, 1957
Gelatin silver print

Ministry of Health, Rio de Janeiro, 1960
Gelatin silver print