David Burnett - Profile
With more than four decades of experience, photojournalist David Burnett has worked in over 70 countries, covered conflicts, every Summer Olympic Games from 1984 to 2012, photographed every US president since JFK, co-founded the photographic agency Contact Press Images, and been awarded some of the highest accolades in the industry. Anne Susskind finds out more from the iconic photographer.
The “napalm girl” is one of the world’s most famous photographs, and David Burnett is intimately connected to it. No, he didn’t take it, and he’s famous for many other things – among them having photographed every American president from JFK to Barack Obama. However, he did share that day in June 1972 with its photographer, Nick Ut, and the story he has to tell about it is both terrible and wonderful.
The photo shocked the world. Just 25 at the time, Burnett was in Vietnam with Ut, taking photos for Time and Life magazines. He and a number of other journalists were observing a battle at the village of Trang Bang, from a short distance away. As he changed a roll of film, a Vietnamese air force fighter came in low and slow, and dropped napalm on what its pilot believed were enemy positions. While Burnett fumbled with his Leica, which was proving difficult to load, hazy images materialised through the smoke, of people running from the burning napalm.
Ut took off toward them, capturing the iconic image of Kim Phuc and her brothers, which made it onto the front page of newspapers worldwide. A picture from a relatively minor military operation became, wrote Burnett in 2012 in a Washington Post piece on the 40th anniversary of its publication, symbolic of the “horrors of war visited on the innocent”.
Except for one photo of Burnett’s taken that day in 1972, published in Life the following week, his images were not published until 2012, eclipsed by Ut’s napalm girl. But he has no misgivings. How could he? “There’s nothing I have ever said, and nor would I say now, that would give the impression that had I been a little smarter or swifter, I would have taken that picture. At a certain point, fate takes over… There are these moments when you are occasionally part of something, but you’re not the one who makes the picture… Everyone who has worked as long as I have has certainly been in contact with a moment like that. In my case, there were probably a couple of them. But that was probably the most famous, and probably everyone in the world over 15 saw that picture.”
Besides, as he points out, there is so much to be grateful for. As a result of Ut’s photo, Kim Phuc was saved. “There was a nurse who cared for her in Vietnam. A German photographer who got her a passport, the English TV correspondent who got her moved from the British-run Saigon First Children’s Hospital to a specialist plastic surgery hospital for life-saving treatment. And this all happened because this little girl who was so badly burned basically got saved because there was someone there to take the picture. The picture is what became the point of interest: Who is that little girl, where is she? That’s what saved her life, what kept her from becoming another statistic, a civilian casualty in the Vietnam War.”
Living near Toronto, Kim Phuc runs a foundation for helping children deal with the trauma of war, and Nick Ut is a good friend of Burnett’s, still photographing for Associated Press, in Los Angeles.
Making contact
Burnett has been named by American Photo as “one of the 100 most important people in photography” which, as he is fond of saying, “made his mom very happy.” But he’s also been honoured with some of the highest accolades in the industry, including being named winner of the 1973 Robert Capa Gold Medal, the 1979 World Press Photo Premier Award, the Overseas Press Club of America’s Olivier Rebbot “Best Reporting from Abroad in Magazines and Books” Award in 1984, and a first prize in the World Press Photo in 2005. He was co-founder, in 1976, of Contact Press Images, a ground-breaking photojournalism agency based in New York, dedicated to in-depth colour features in a time when photojournalism was in danger of being eclipsed by colour television – its mission, to “reaffirm the existence of inalienable human rights” and “the necessity to question authority”.
Some of its earliest members include Annie Leibovitz, whose association began in 1977, and Israeli-born Alon Reininger, who covered the South African anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s, and conflict in the Middle East, as well as AIDs in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Burnett was covering the 1979 Iranian revolution. The work was published widely in Time, along with his portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, Time’s “Man of the Year”. He is also author of several books, among them 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World and Soul Rebel: an Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley.
Now 70, Burnett is most famous for being one of the few to have photographed all the American presidents since JFK. The trajectory started in 1963, his final year of high school, with a chance snap when his mother took him to see Kennedy speak in downtown Salt Lake City. His portfolio of Obama, is at the other end of the spectrum, with access granted, and often touchingly intimate images of the presidential couple.
Lingering
Burnett’s aim now is to have people linger over a photo. “I’ve spent enough time at news-stands [to have that] understanding of where someone is touched by a picture – when they leaf through a magazine and there’s that two or three second hesitation when they stop and look, when they see something that stops them. You can tell by the way they turn a page. That’s really what you’re trying to do, trying to go for,” he says.
His work has plenty to linger over. It’s wide-ranging, his skill and eye delivering him to extraordinary assignments the world over, but never neglecting or forgetting the ordinary, and making it extraordinary. He’s worked in 70 countries and covered coups and revolutions, wars, sport, poverty; and the people, he says, are both the famous and the “unfamous”. His images do what photojournalism should do, that is, tell stories.
In Washington, there are presidents and power, but it’s also about the national mall that is ‘the nation’s front yard’; a photo of a tourist taking a selfie at the reflecting pool, a banal moment made special in moody black and white, as revealing as the faces of Vietnam War vets that come to scrub and wash the memorial wall.
Burnett credits his school yearbook with his discovery of photography. His mother had told him that if he wanted to get into college, he had to do something besides just be a student, so he applied to work on the yearbook. The choices were the literary, business, art or photographic staff. “Nothing else seemed very interesting to me. It was a process of elimination. I went straight to the photo staff.” Once he started taking pictures, Burnett says it took about three weeks for him to decide that was what he wanted to do.
© David Burnett.
From seeing his first print emerge from the developer, it seemed like magic and he was hooked. After that, a first job with a local weekly, then a summer internship with Time in New York and Washington DC while in college. After college, and a brief stint in Washington, he went to Miami “in search of great stories”.
Getting ‘the picture’
Burnett says that it’s difficult to explain to someone who has grown up with digital photography what it was like being a photojournalist in the era of film cameras. Like the napalm girl moment in Vietnam, where Ut got “the picture”, there was that moment when your finite roll of film would end, at frame 36. In those “in between” moments, brief as they might have been, there was always the possibility of “the picture” taking place, and you missing it.
In 1984, he did get “the picture”. It was of Mary Decker, the American athlete who fell during the running of the 3,000 metres race in the Olympics. Burnett says that it is probably his best known image. “Everybody over the age of 25 knows it, even if they don’t know who shot it,” he says. “I like it because it became one of those iconic pictures – it’s a good picture of an amazing and heart-rending event, captured in the middle of a crowd of 80,000 people, and a worldwide audience on television. I feel now, looking at that picture, like I was peeking at this very private movement of trauma and sadness of this very young runner who by all accounts is one of the greatest runners in the history of American long-distance running.”
© David Burnett.
When a photo is just right, it achieves something film and video does not, he says, “capturing time and emotion in an indelible way.” Film and video treat every moment equally, yet some moments are not equal.
Floating above the noise
These days though, it’s harder to stand out with the Internet overly stocked with too many pictures, an unending flow, some good and some not so good. “In some ways, for your average person, it’s hard to digest what’s out there. It’s difficult, some days, for really good pics to float above the noise. But occasionally one does, and it becomes ‘the picture’, and when that happens in the world we live in, it means that many, many millions will see it.”
The world of photography these days bears little resemblance to what it looked like when Burnett started out. And while it’s certainly tough out there, Burnett says that you just have to keep moving forward and work out how best to make things work for you as a photographer. “It’s an interesting time now, but I have to say that it was really great in the days when things weren’t so rushed, and when speed was not the prime consideration of everything. As I look back on 20, 30 years ago, it was a little less about the speed of delivery and what it was you were able to do with it.”
In a world gone mad with digital photography, Burnett is fully equipped, but still carries with him a 60-year-old press camera and a $30 plastic pinhole Holga camera. He’s nostalgic, but says he has to keep moving forward. “It’s tough, but it can’t be changed, and photographers just have to figure out how to live with it. I am still intrigued by the idea of taking pictures and publishing pictures. I look forward to continue to document today’s history. I still enjoy something I can hold in my hands and flip a page to look at it. The further we go forward, the more special that will seem. I’m not sure, but I believe still photos will remain a way of communicating.”
Even someone as renowned as Burnett needs the “paying jobs”. He advertises himself as a “world travelling photojournalist” who works for himself, magazines, ad agencies and corporations and “possibly for you”. He also regularly runs workshops, most recently in Paris.
Young photographers thinking of pursuing photography as a vocation should realise how stiff the competition is. Everyone has a phone or camera of some kind, and it’s much more difficult to genuinely claim that something is a world exclusive these days. There’s also so much competing with still photography. “It only makes sense if you are completely passionate and compelled,” Burnett says. “If you want to just do it for fun, then do something else [for a living], but if you have to do it, then you should try do it.” While it’s certainly much tougher than it used to be to make money, Burnett says that it’s still possible for the most tenacious and creative.