THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR
Over six decades, photojournalist David Burnett has captured world-changing moments, world leaders, and world records.
By INDIA STOUGHTON
PHOTOS BY DAVID BURNETT
David Burnett was a teenager when he first got behind a camera. To please his mother, who wanted him to do more extracurricular activities, he signed up to take photographs for the school yearbook, thinking it “might be fun.” Soon after, he visited a darkroom for the first time, learning how to place blank photo paper under the enlarger light and then into the tray of developer fluid, where a picture began to appear. “It was magic,” he says. “It was like some kind of special power that was given to photographers. I just loved it.”
He never looked back. In a career that has spanned more than 60 years, he has taken some of the most iconic images, photographing wars and watershed moments, world leaders and historic figures. He has photographed every US president since John F. Kennedy, and every summer Olympics since the 1984 Los Angeles Games. At almost 80, he is still behind the camera, and still in love with the craft.
Burnett exhibited at the Xposure International Photography Festival in Sharjah this winter, showing photographs of people who are veterans in their fields, as he is in his own. His ongoing series Fourth Quarter Athletes captures senior sportspeople competing with inspirational passion and skill. Competitions for athletes aged 50 and above, including the National Senior Games and the Huntsman World Senior Games, are held regularly across the US.
“Being the same age, these are my people,” Burnett jokes. After decades of photographing the world’s most elite athletes at the Olympics, “I guess I just was piqued by the fact that it existed,” he says.
Burnett’s ongoing series Fourth Quarter Athletes captures senior sportspeople competing with inspirational passion and skill. Taped hands, above, before a senior women’s volleyball game. Burnett’s photographs convey the athletes’ focus and determination, both through bodies caught in motion and more intimate details.
Shot in black and white, his photographs convey the athletes’ focus and determination, both through bodies caught in motion and more intimate details. One close-up shot of a woman’s hands captures paper-thin skin scattered with sunspots. The ridged wrinkles on the backs of her wrists and the whorls of her knuckles contrast starkly with the smooth white tape wrapped around all eight fingers, the crescent-moons of her fingernails just protruding from the top.
Some of the most evocative photographs capture sprinters bent with age yet full of power as they race down the track, and senior weightlifters, barbells in their clasped hands made white with chalk, their faces contorted with effort. “You can’t believe how much energy and blood is expended [by] these people to do something that they love doing,” he says.
Burnett has poured his own energy and blood into his career, which began with a college internship at Time magazine. After graduating, in 1968, it took him a couple of years to find his feet. “The thing I didn’t understand was that you didn’t need to be on assignment from somebody,” he recalls. “As [an] artist, it’s great to get assignments when they come, but you should take whatever it is that moves you, and that’s where you should put all your energy as a photographer.”
In October 1970, he bought a one-way ticket to Saigon, intending to freelance in Vietnam for up to six weeks. He was there for two years. Working primarily for Time and Life magazines, he witnessed defining moments of the conflict—he was present at the scene when Nick Út captured the famous Napalm Girl photo—but he also documented quieter moments. In a portrait of a young American tank repairman, his face and hands smeared with grease, Burnett captures the expression of raw longing on his face as he stares out of frame, clutching a letter from home.
A young US soldier with a letter from home, Lang Vei, Vietnam, 1971.
“The first time I ever got a letter from someone responding to one of my photographs was that picture. It was a woman who had been a nurse in World War Two, and was very moved,” Burnett recalls. “You never know how your picture is going to affect somebody else.” In Vietnam, he learned an important lesson: “If there’s something that interests you, go shoot it. That’s where the good pictures get made.”
Persistence, he learned too, is at the heart of photojournalism. Over the decades, he has spent days or weeks chasing seemingly fruitless leads, sometimes long after other photographers have given up, to gain access to the people making history and the places where it’s being made. “I’m trying to recount history for everybody that comes after me,” he says. “I need to be in the room, not out in the crowd.” Eventually, ‘Come back tomorrow’ becomes ‘Wait a moment’. “And as I always tell young photographers, there’s a huge difference between them. That’s what you want as a journalist. You want to be on the other side of the door.”
This is what has sustained Burnett’s passion for his work for over six decades. “When you get lucky and everything aligns in your direction, it’s exciting,” he says. “It’s sometimes scary exciting, but it’s what you know you’re supposed to do.”
Burnett views himself as a historian, recounting world-changing moments for those who come after him. In July 1969, hundreds of thousands of Americans travelled to Florida to watch the launch of Apollo XI, the first mission to land on the Moon.
Another photograph that holds a special place in his memory is the first of what would become many iconic sports images. At his first Olympics in 1984, Burnett was positioned beside the track for the women’s 3000-metres race where US hopeful, and favourite, Mary Decker collided with the barefoot 18-year-old British-South African runner Zola Budd, collapsing on the track in agony. “Some people say it’s one of the great Olympic pictures,” he says. “The taste of defeat is so obvious in her face… That picture was kind of me officially becoming a sports photographer.”
Another personal favourite is an image taken in Geneva in November 1985 during the first summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The two men are seated in chairs angled together, but their bodies are turned away from one another as each man leans close to the interpreter whispering into his ear. “It’s like they’re on two different planets,” he says.
Burnett has photographed every US President from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. Here, Senator Obama, top, then the Democratic nominee, flies to St. Louis to campaign (2008). Above, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev during their summit, in Geneva, 1985. It was the first meeting of the two leaders, alone except for translators.
Burnett has embraced the benefits of digital photography, but he never lost his love of analogue. In the early 2000s, seeking to stand apart from the increasingly uniform press images taken using the same digital equipment, he began experimenting with an old large-format camera, a Graflex Speed Graphic. By pairing it with a Kodak Aero Ektar reconnaissance lens, made in the 1940s for the US Air Force, he was able to take exposures that were fast enough to shoot sports while retaining a distinctive large-format aesthetic. It would become a visual signature. A series shot at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, where he taped a pair of black jeans over the window of his hotel bathroom to create a makeshift darkroom, won the World Press Photo prize for best sports story.
Part of the appeal of his unique analogue setup is the limitations it imposes. “I only have two shots,” he says. “It’s not like I have 3,000 pictures, like you have on a memory card. So I have to decide where I want to shoot.” He has carried the Speed Graphic to every Olympics since. “Every time I drag that camera out, I end up with at least one picture that’s worth having done all the work and all the pain and the suffering from it,” he says.
As the internet, phone cameras, and AI have transformed the landscape of image-making, a single great photograph is worth more than ever. “Even in this age of being inundated with pictures, there are still [those] that you just can’t look away from,” Burnett says. “That’s still what the power of photography is about.”
