Colorado College Bulletin
Eyes Wide Open
By KARRIE WILLIAMS
All photos by David Burnett '68
Click here to see Burnett's photos.
For more than three decades, veteran photojournalist David Burnett '68 has been the eyes of the world, taking pictures of the famous and the infamous, documenting war, famine, grief and joy. He's photographed Olympians in victory (Carl Lewis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee) and in the agony of defeat (Mary Decker). He's covered the Indo-Pakistan war, the Iranian revolution, and the fall of Chile's Allende. He's photographed the Pope, presidents Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Carter and Clinton, Cuba's Castro, Russia's Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Iran's Khomeini, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Intel's Andy Grove, fashion models, movie stars, kings and queens.
Burnett's work regularly appears in the world's leading magazines and newspapers. At 53, he has swept all the major contests, winning (among many others) the Overseas Press Club Award for Best Photo Reporting from Abroad and the Premier Award in the 1980 World Press Competition for a photograph at a Thai nursery camp. His news photos go beyond merely documenting the events -- they interpret the mood.
"I'm not really a historian, nor do I have any great philosophical sense of history, but I very much enjoy the fact that what I do may someday be considered a small part of the history of this age," says Burnett.After graduating from Colorado College in 1968 with a B.A. in political science, he began working as a freelancer for Time and later Life magazines in Washington, D.C., Miami, and South Vietnam.
As the war wound down, he moved from Saigon back to New York, working as a contract photographer for Life. When Life ceased publishing as a weekly in 1972, he joined the French photo agency Gamma, traveling the world for their news department for two years. In 1975 he founded Contact Press Images with editor Robert Pledge and several other photographers. In the last two decades, he has traveled extensively, working for most of the major photographic and general interest magazines in the U.S. and Europe.
No matter how challenging the assignment, Burnett is known as someone who returns with "The Picture."
He describes his photographs as "usually pretty quiet. They don't jump out at you and grab you and shake you. They just kind of sit back and wait to be looked at. I think that's particularly apparent in my pictures of Cambodian refugees or the victims of the Ethiopian famine."
Having learned a great deal about compassion in photography when he was in Saigon, Burnett has "a permanently built-in skeptical eye." In the news business, that's not a bad thing to have. It certainly serves him well as a member of the White House News Photographers' Association, a group founded by photographers who regularly covered President Warren G. Harding.
"There is a formidable attraction as a journalist to try and find, in those rare public moments, some kind of truth, or discover a visual gem that gives a real feeling for what the man is like," he says of his job photographing the leader of the free world. "There have been a few photographers who pierce the veil to see presidential life in its more mundane, and thus more interesting, moments. But for most of us, our view is limited to what we can connive and cajole out of a situation, most usually one that is very public."
The best pictures, he says, are often those isolated moments that transform a big public event into some kind of personal or private photograph. "Whether it’s Ronald Reagan on a bus, looking thoughtfully at a reflection of himself in the window, or Gerald Ford, puffing his pipe on a Saturday morning in the Oval Office, there are images we strive for and seldom accomplish.
"Our job is to try and pluck those moments when we see them," he says. "To look at a 'nothing' event and try to find some kernel of visual truth, to make some kind of statement. Everyone working in the White House press corps knows that what we see is really only a scarce glimpse of what presidential life is really about."
When Burnett is shooting in a group of photographers, odds are he's focusing on something the others aren't. "If everybody's looking in one direction, there has to be something interesting going on someplace else. And that's where I often look."
Job satisfaction, he says, comes from working next to 500 photographers and coming away with something different.
Waiting is key. "You know you have only one try," he says. "It takes discipline and patience to capture ‘The Moment.’ Sometimes you get it, most often you don't."
At the Atlanta Olympics (covered for Contact and Time magazine), Burnett rediscovered a way of seeing that had been lost to many photographers. Shooting with shorter lenses, he purposefully included more of the background, lending a strong sense of place to his pictures.
"As someone who was not really a sports photographer, I had become more and more interested in trying to find new ways to capture the miracle of sport," he writes in "Emotion," a Web essay.
[http://zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/burnett/default.html]"Technology, our now constant companion, has blessed us each year with new and exciting tools. Now no event is too far away or too dimly lit to be captured by the willing photographer. Lenses became longer and faster (and heavier!), films faster and finer grained. The best sports photographers were getting closer and closer to that magic moment when the action, the tension, the feel, and the body, all come together to give the viewer an immediate look at what is really going on.
"I realized, though, that much of what bothered me about contemporary sports photography was that, in an attempt to bring the viewer ever closer, it often omitted the context of where and how the event was taking place.
"I consciously decided to shoot in medium format, something that would yield a finer, larger negative and permit large prints to be made with ease. I must say that the transition to medium/large format for someone who has spent a life in 35mm was a challenging one. But the exercise was very invigorating. I hoped to take some pictures that might give a hint of the sport, but in a way that takes you there to see and feel it. It was a wonderful project for me. Trying to see sport, or any other subject, in a way you haven't traditionally done is always stimulating and exciting. I hope this sense of excitement is something the viewer can share."Editor's note:
Burnett '68, a member of the American Society of Media Photographers, The National Press Photographers Association, the White House News Photographers’ Association, the Senate Press Photographers Gallery, and the Society of American Travel Writers, has kindly shared these images from his award-winning portfolio.Back to Index