René Burri

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.