René Burri

René Burri was born in Zurich in April 1933. His career as a photographer began early when, at the age of 13, he photographed Winston Churchill as he drove past in an open top car on a visit to Switzerland. Burri studied photography and film-making under Hans Finsler at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. He first took up a Leica camera whilst undertaking national service with the Swiss army. He went on to work as an assistant cameraman, firstly on the set of the Walt Disney film Switzerland (1955).

Burri joined the Magnum Photo Agency in 1955. Shortly after joining, his reportage about deaf-mute children, ‘Touch of Music for the Deaf’, received acclaim when it was published in LIFE magazine. He went on to publish in Look, Paris-Match and The Sunday Times but his work was most widely circulated through the Swiss weekly, Du. His work became characterised by an empathetic humanism combined with strong composition through geometry, architecture and form. He would have a long association with Magnum, opening the Magnum Gallery in Paris in 1962 and becoming the chair of Magnum France in 1982.

A witness to many of the defining events of the mid-twentieth century, René Burri documented the construction of the Berlin Wall and conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lebanon. He was in Egypt during the Suez Crisis, where he met Gamal Abdel Nasser and later accompanied him along the Syrian desert border during the brief United Arab Republic. Reflecting on the dangers of his work, Burri remarked on how often he narrowly escaped harm. In 1963, he secured rare access to photograph Che Guevara during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and alongside his reportage, he produced portraits of leading cultural figures including Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, Jean Renoir, and Le Corbusier.