The Utah Museum of Fine Arts has an current exhibition of the remarkable photojournalism of David Burnett, spanning much of his 40 year plus career. I visited this exhibition on Sunday.
David Burnett is a photojournalist with more than four decades of work covering the news, the people, and visual tempo of our age. He is co-founder of Contact Press Images,the New York based photojournalism agency, now entering its 36th year. He has covered virtually every war during this period as well as the important events of the time. In a recent issue of American Photo magazine Burnett was named one of the "100 Most Important People in Photography." He has been a contract photographer for TIME since 2003, a position he held for 15 years in the 1970s and 80s. His kit includes a 60 year old Speed Graphic press camera, and a plastic $30 HOLGA. Each has a place along side his digital cameras, each camera a tool to find the right look for the right moment.
The exhibition is called "too close" - a deliberately inverting reference Robert Capa's famous remark that if there's something wrong with an image then the photographer was not close enough. The premise is that you can get too close and, by stepping back, DB is able to bring a sense of context and historical environment into the momentous events he is capturing.
The exhibition at UMFA covers Burnett's wide-ranging images of Vietnam, American Presidential election campaigns back to the 1960 s, the Iranian revolution, President Nixon's resignation, Congressional hearings, Papal tours, the funeral of Princess Diana and the last shuttle flight. While many are small group images, a significant number include large crowds or confused military or other scenes containing many elements, movement and activity.
The key skill which DB brings to these images is the ability to impose order on these busy scenes through an amazing compositional skill. Look, for example, at his image of Jimmy Carter speaking from a barn during the 1976 primaries. The photograph was taken from the back of the crowd and Carter is just a speck in the distance. But the crowd sweeps round to form a point atleading the eye to the spot where we know the is.
In other images, such as the crowds mourning Princess Diana, Burnett can always find a focal point - in one case, a woman standing amid the sitting mourners, clutching flowers, in another a man standing, seemingly directing the gaze of the rest of the crowd.
Yet other images show how order and focus can be brought to a large crowd scene. The women mobbing Khomeni after the 1970 revolution in Iran, in which thousands seem to lean and point towards the Aytollah, a tiny figure standing at a window; the crowd at a Bobby Kennedy rally, where the politician is picked out by the light; a crowd of photographers create a pathway through which we see Secretary of State Condolezza Rice testifying at a Congressional hearing.
How Burnett managed to bring this sense of composition to crowded and chaotic scenes is a testament to his innate skills. Photographers who find this difficult would benefit from studying his images. A book of the images is available at reasonable cost from the UMFA.
More information at http://umfa.utah.edu/
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