Retrospective

René Burri is a ‘field man’: a journalist-photographer. If we examine more than forty years of his work, we perceive that all the various genres of documentary photography can be found. His signature can be seen on classic ‘reportages,’ on general essays in book form, on isolated images that mark milestones in color or black and white, on series, on sequences, on news-style photographs, on independent photographic creations. He has produced a countless number of portraits, transformed ambiances into formal graphic compositions, summarized the world’s future in iconographic formulas that have the appeal of a parable. And yet, something of a “typical” Burri does exist - something that has nothing to do with style or a mask or pure esthetics. It has to do with curiosity, with being irrepressibly drunk on life, and also with an attitude, an acute conscience regarding the way one stands before culture, before events, and before men.

Hans-Michael Koetzle
Exhibition curator