Adventurous Magnum photographer known for portraits of Che and Picasso and insightful reportage from remote corners of the worldThe photographer René Burri, known for his portraits of Che Guevara and Pablo Picasso, who has died aged 81, was an early member of the renowned Magnum photo agency. Burris naturalistic, editorial style of photography suited the company well, and he was a close friend of Werner Bischof, a fellow Swiss photojournalist, who had joined Magnum in 1949, scarcely a year after its creation. When Bischof was killed in a road accident in Peru in 1954, Burri stepped into the older mans role as the adventurous and cosmopolitan photographer who covered the most extreme and remote landscapes of the world.In the heyday of photo-magazines, Burris work appeared regularly in publications including Life, Look, Paris-Match, Stern, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph and, most often, Du, the mass-circulation Swiss weekly. Du commissioned stories from around the Mediterranean, and Burri also picked up industrial and commercial assignments in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey from the late 1950s onwards. At the same time, quieter stories from closer to home the darkly cobbled streets of a misty Prague; a lengthy picture story on Germany in the 1960s that became a major touring exhibition showed a Europe ravaged by war, but returning to work, and even to carnival. Continue reading...
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