The Swiss photographer René Burri was born in 1933. At the age of 13, he photographed Winston Churchill in Zurich. He completed his training as a photographer at the Zurich School of Applied Arts.
In 1955, Burri received international attention for one of his first reportages, “Touch of Music for the Deaf,” on music pedagogue Mimi Scheiblauer’s classes for deaf-mute children, published in Life magazine. Burri became an associate of Magnum in 1955 and a full member in 1959.
While traveling throughout Europe, the Middle East, Southeast and East Asia, and Latin and North America, he covered historical events, such as Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to Cuba in 1974, the fiftieth anniversary of the Long March in China in 1985, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and events in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Among many other subjects, he portrayed Maria Callas, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, Le Corbusier, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. His portrait of the revolutionary with his cigar became known the world over.
Burri’s first book, Die Deutschen, was published by Fretz & Wasmuth in Zurich in 1962 and the following year by Robert Delpire in Paris with the title Les Allemands. Many international magazines also published his reportages. In 1965, Burri participated in the creation of Magnum Films and spent six months in China, where he made the film The Two Faces of China, produced by the BBC.
He was the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1991, the Dr Erich Salomon Prize from the German Photography Society in 1998, the Swiss Press Photo Life Achievement Award in 2011, and the Leica Hall of Fame Award in 2013.
He set up the Fondation René Burri in 2013, which preserves his complete works and is located at Photo Elysée in Lausanne, where in 2020 the retrospective Explosions of Sight was held. Burri died in Zurich, at age 81, on October 20, 2014.