René Burri, 1933-2014, was a Swiss photographer who has worked in Zurich and Paris, a member of the Magnum agency since 1959.
In 1949, René Burri entered the Zurich School of Applied Arts. In 1954 and 1955, Burri worked as an assistant cameraman for the Walt Disney Film Production in Switzerland. Initially attracted by the documentary cinema that will influence him afterwards, Burri finally turns towards photography and his photos work in series and tell a story.
Zurich considers photography as a means of personal expression, a tool for showing images that reflect above all their own preoccupations. Unlike his mentor, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who captured "the decisive moment", Burri worked more on the long term, as his first book The Germans or his report on the last gauchos in Argentina showed.
In the 1950s, he worked for major magazines and especially for Life. Burri then photographed almost all the major events of the time: the Korean War, then the Vietnam War, the Cuban crisis and Latin America (where he photographed Che Guevara and Fidel Castro), economic and cultural upheavals in China, South America or Europe. He is a witness of history who wants to restore his own vision of the world.
**There are no corpses on his war pictures. **The photographer is especially famous for his strong images, which refer to the most tragic events, but also for his graphic compositions. His first major publication and the one that made him famous is his series on the retrospective of Picasso at the Palazzo Real in Milan. He also photographed the famous canvas Guernica.
He also works for the photography agency Magnum, of which he has been a member since 1959.
In 2004, the European photography house, the MEP, offers a retrospective of his photos from 1950 to 2000, which will also be shown in Lausanne at the Elysée Museum in the same year. In 2013, he founded his foundation at the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne.
