René Burri

Soviet War Memorial at Treptow, East Berlin, Germany, 1959 1959, printed 2014, is a black and white photograph by the Swiss photographer René Burri. The right side of the image contains the back of a dark-suited man from the shoulders down, hands clasped behind his back in a gesture of respect or contemplation. Beyond his left shoulder, a procession of military personnel in uniform followed by civilians makes its way up the steps of the memorial. The Soviet War Memorial was designed by the Soviet architect Yakov Belopolsky and completed in 1949. It served as the central war memorial of East Germany.

This image is part of a portfolio of twenty-seven prints (Tate P14301–P14327), selected and compiled by Burri as a cohesive group shortly before his death in 2014. The selection spans his sixty-year career and includes a number of his best known black and white works, as well as a group of lesser-known colour works. The portfolio was printed by Burri in 2014 and this copy is number three in an edition of five plus one artist’s proof. It contains fourteen black and white gelatin silver prints and thirteen colour C-prints, highlighting Burri’s diverse use of light and shadow alongside his experimental use of colour. Although predominantly known for shooting in black and white, Burri often travelled with two cameras, switching between them to capture images in both colour and greyscale. This was a progressive approach at the time, when colour photography was generally only used in advertising or for commercial practices. Burri revisited his archive of colour images later in his career and published the monograph René Burri: Impossible Reminiscences in 2013 as a decisive examination of this work.

Burri is most famous for his work as a member of the photojournalism agency Magnum Photos and the portfolio includes images produced in this context from projects in Brazil, Egypt, Lebanon, East Germany, China and South Korea, as well as an iconic image of Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara taken in Havana in 1963. The young Burri was introduced to Magnum by fellow Swiss photographer Werner Bischof and began working with the agency first as an associate in 1955, before becoming a full member in 1959. His extensive career encompassed a wide variety of photographic practices, including documentary, reportage, street photography and the photo-essay, as well as portraiture, architecture and landscape. He often worked on press assignments and personal projects simultaneously, building a varied portfolio of work in both black and white and colour. Burri’s use of both bird’s eye and worm’s eye views and his attention to the effects of light and shadow created by architectural forms are reminiscent of techniques used by modernist photographers in the early twentieth century.

Further reading
Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri Photographs, London 2003.
Hans-Michael Koetzle, René Burri: Impossible Reminiscences, London 2013.

Shoair Mavlian
January 2015
Arthur Goodwin
October 2018