A Salute to the Masters: EXPO 2015 (A Tribute to René Burri)

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At the end of October last year, René Burri, a great master of photography of the last century, passed away. As a tribute to him, I would like to show you some photos that I took last month at EXPO 2015 in Milan, which was inspired by his series featuring the world’s fairs held in Osaka, Okinawa, and Montreal. Take a look!

This article is a tribute to the great Swiss photographer, René Burri, who died at the end of October last year. Born in 1933 in Zurich, where he studied at the School of Applied Arts from 1949 to 1953, Burri began to work as a documentary photographer and filmmaker during his military service. Afterwards he worked as a cameramen for Disney and as a photographer, going to places all over the world from 1956 to 1959 and collaborating with the most famous illustrated magazines like Life, Look, Stern, and Paris-Match.

Thanks to his colleague Werner Bischof , Burri began to collaborate with Magnum Photos in 1955. In 1959, he became a full-fledged member of this agency, covering many important political events around the world. He is famous for his iconic portrait of the revolutionary Che Guevara, as well as of Fidel Castro, Le Corbusier, Alberto Giacometti, Yves Klein, and Pablo Picasso.

Credits: sirio174

However, the widespread use of his portrait of the Cuban revolutionary smoking a cigar has partly obscured Burri’s considerable artistic talent. See, for example, his book Die Deutschen, a reportage about German people in the ’60s reminiscent of Robert Frank’s classic The Americans in both layout and format. My favorite images from this series are this picture taken at the Frankfurt train station and this candid photo taken in 1959 in a Berlin funfair.

Recently, this book had inspired Andreas Herzau’s work The Swiss. Burri received the Leica Hall of Fame prize in 2003.

Credits: sirio174

Burri was the author of a series of photographs documenting the world’s fairs in Osaka, Okinawa and Montreal. For this tribute, I chose a series of photos I took at the EXPO World’s Fair in Milan with my Olympus 35RC camera.

Credits: sirio174

I visited this important exhibition, which was dedicated to food, with my students in October 2015 (I’m a teacher in an Upper Technical School in Como). It was very crowded, with long queues at the most important pavilions. For me, the first photo in this article is the one that better represents the spirit of Burri’s vision—compare the glass reflections on Burri’s photo taken in Frankfurt with mine of people reflected on the mirror surface of the pavilion.

In the series of photos below, I’d like to show you some moments of fun: students having fun on the slide at the German pavilion, popular Italian music performers, and the comings and goings of people waiting for the water and light show of the tree of life.

Credits: sirio174

A Salute to the Masters is a series dedicated to great photographers that I like. I posted other tributes for Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Ernst Haas, Stephen Shore, Gabriele Basilico, Robert Adams, Thomas Struth, J.H. Lartigue, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank, Gianni Berengo Gardin, André Kertész, Willy Ronis, Brassaï, Rodchenko, Dan Graham, Henry Grant, William Eggleston, Dennis Stock, Juergen Teller, Martin Parr, Peter Mitchell, Mario Giacomelli, David Burnett, Michael Williamson, Bernard Cahier, Harry Gruyaert, Bruno Barbey, Paul Strand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Lothar Rübelt, David Goldblatt, Henry Cartier-Bresson, Raymond Depardon, Aaron Siskind, Mario de Biasi, Sabine Weiss, Jack Delano, Bill Eppridge, Édouard Boubat, Serge Moulinier, George Krause, Robert Doisneau, Ferdinando Scianna, Robert Capa, Alexey Brodovitch, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Christopher Williams, Pepi Merisio, Josef Koudelka, Christopher Anderson and Izis Bidermanas. I especially love street photography and urban architectural photography.

written by sirio174 on 2015-11-14 #lifestyle #rene-burri #expo-2015 #regular-contributor #a-salute-to-the-masters

3 Comments

  1. oriolphotography
    oriolphotography ·

    So glad to see you admire Rene Burri. He was one of my favorite photographers too, and always a gentleman, besides covering many conflicts he never showed a body in his images. His book Photographs, published by Phaidon, is one of my reference books.

  2. sirio174
    sirio174 ·

    @oriolphotography Many thanks for your nice comment, take a look to the other authors of this series! Next week I'll publish an article dedicated to Mary Ellen Mark

  3. oriolphotography
    oriolphotography ·

    Hi, very interesting project! Some of my favourites are those dedicated to Martin Parr and to Josef Koudelka. For Mary Ellen Mark, this can be very challenging!

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