What can be said about photographer David Burnett that hasn’t been already? From portraits of presidents and Bob Marley, to combat photography in Vietnam, to every Olympics since 1984, to co-founding the photo agency Contact Press Images, he is one of the most recognized and recognizable photojournalists working today. And this is not even mentioning his use of a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic and vintage lens to photograph sports, political campaigns, portraits, and even the recent Presidential impeachment trial.
Above photograph: Barack and Michelle Obama share a sundae, Iowa, 2012 © 2020 David Burnett/Contact Press Images
Burnett is also a Sony Artisan of Imagery and uses the Sony Alpha a9 and the Alpha a7R series, in addition to APS-C models, such as the Sony a6600. What brought Burnett, a notorious brand-agnostic shooter, into the Sony camp, and how does that jibe with his acclaimed ability to adapt to varied assignments and excel with a range of camera formats?
During a recent conversation with Burnett, a true love for the craft (and the gear) of photography sprang from his every story. I may have found the answer sitting at the heart of both the above questions: He possesses a genial but dogged persistence, and a real thirst for experimentation. Whether this persistence got him into the inner sanctum of a guarded national leader, or this willingness to experiment led him to put a vintage lens on a state-of-the-art mirrorless camera, he seems to maintain the attitude of follow your hunch, push until you’ve found the unique shot, and use the gear that works for the situation in which you find yourself.
Even asking about his first photograph of a president, his persistence is apparent. Burnett recounts: “For so many kids, the yearbook in high school was the way you got going. I joined as a junior and they had a Rolleiflex and Speed Graphic. Because the Rollei was considered fairly indestructible, I got it. But I ended up buying a used Exakta for $40, with a manual 50mm f/3.5 lens. I didn’t even use a 4 x 5 until I was in my forties.”
My question was how he got a photo of John F. Kennedy when he was only seventeen, but we got side-tracked talking about ten different cameras and lenses, the “magic of the darkroom,” and a fateful mishap that ended his professional darkroom career.
It turns out he went with his mother to see Kennedy speak and got, “out of focus, under-exposed and blurry shots, where you could barely tell it was Kennedy,” but then showed the dedication to go back to an outdoor event the next day and get the shot that ran in his yearbook.
“While I was waiting for my new Pentax to arrive, I was using a Petriflex 35mm screw-mount camera with a Vemar 135mm f/3.5 and I couldn’t see to focus so I just put it on infinity, and 50' is not infinity! But the next day at the airport photo op—outdoors, f/11, 1/250 second—I got the shot. And I got the bug at that point, too.”
I offered an anecdote about missing a big shot of my own, and Burnett reflected, “These are the things that stay with you, and hopefully become part of your learning experience. Everyone who says they don’t have one of those stories is lying.”
So how can one photographer adapt so well, be so versatile? From portraiture to sports to conflict, Chile to Iran, and everywhere in between, is adaptability a learned trait or a skill he’s always possessed?
“I think I have always been up for what has been thrown at me, open to the power of suggestion and to the power of an assignment.”
In 1970, bouncing between photo jobs in Washington, D.C., and Miami, Burnett bought his own one-way ticket to Vietnam, for $512. It was supposed to be a month, maybe two, and he stayed for two years, becoming the “bureau guy” for Time magazine. Asked if he felt this was the challenge he needed, he replied, “Yes, it was a chance to see what kind of pictures I could really make.”
After a short stint at LIFE magazine, which coincided with the magazine’s sudden first closure, the French press agency Gamma called. This was another leap into the unknown, which became a “lifesaver.” Gamma covered everything and on “spec,” producing good stories and then selling those stories, not relying on assignments, and “believing in their photographers.” It was this model that Burnett used a few years later when he founded the Contact Press Images agency, which continues to be a premier independent photo agency.
I asked if a willingness to experiment technically was always part of his nature, because it seems it was later in his career that he began to try different formats and lenses not normally associated with contemporary photojournalism.
“I was a pretty standard 35mm guy from Vietnam all through the 1970s and into the ’80s. There was always a 28mm or a 24mm, and a 35mm or a 50mm around my neck. On the right shoulder it would be an 85mm and a camera bag, and then a 180mm on the left shoulder. This meant not only was I covered from wide-angle to telephoto but I also had four rolls of film operating simultaneously. If something came up, I would be prepared. It was tough on your body and I don’t really miss it. I got into digital around 2003, but what really pushed me into messing around with the HOLGA and other formats was the fact that we were all using the same gear, everyone is shooting with a wide-angle zoom or a 70-200mm or some variation. We’re not taking the same pictures, but there’s this sense that it’s all too similar. I was looking at vintage sports photos from the 1920s Olympics and realizing there was something that is not a 35mm mentality.
“That started me in the ‘one-twenty’ world and, by 2003, when it seemed we would have a war in Iraq, I worked a Senate committee meeting and just decided to take my old Speed Graphic for the heck of it. I got a couple of cool pictures, so I started hunting around for a lens that was faster than the 127mm f/4.7, and found this Aero-Ektar lens, which was built in 1943 for the Army Air Corps, to put in these industrial-sized aerial reconnaissance cameras. Now I’m shooting with the equivalent of a 60mm f/2.5 with the 4 x 5 negative and narrower depth of field and that was a whole other way of shooting. I was still shooting 35mm but would take a few shots with the Speed Graphic and submit those to Newsweek, Time, U.S. News, and invariably, one of the three would buy, so I realized there was some value in this look. By 2004 I went all-in and shot politics, and the Olympics with it. I still appreciated the speed and long lenses of the 35 system, but I loved being able to see things in a different way.”
Always curious about the mindset that drives successful journalists, I asked if he suffers greatly from a fear of failure, especially when operating on such a high level?
“You never get over worrying about failure, but I do like the idea of forcing myself to think of other ways to do things, and I like what I see in myself when I do that. Everybody has some threshold for adventure, and I don’t mind trying something that doesn’t work. And that has happened, but I don’t generally advertise it in a loud voice.
“I have this little Sony a6600 with the new Sony E 16-55mm lens, with a constant f/2.8, so the equivalent is like a 24-80mm. It’s fantastic, I have the a9 and a7RIII, but I love this little guy, it’s getting back to a Cartier-Bresson thing, just wandering around with a small camera. But I’m crazy about the fact that these mirrorless cameras let you use old lenses. I just got a 16mm cinema lens with a 25mm focal length, f/1.4, which makes a circular image on the a6600 with a very sharp center and gooey edges. Sony mirrorless lets me do fun and funky things with stuff you never thought you’d use again. Everything is adaptable, and I have lenses going back forty years that I’m using. But my favorite Sony lens now is the 100-400mm zoom. It’s sharp at every length and, unlike the old days, I don’t have to carry so much stuff.
“I was afraid at the outset of mirrorless that I wouldn’t be able to compose looking through a ‘miniature TV screen,’ but it took me about ten minutes to get used to the viewfinder. And what I love now about the a6600 is that it takes the same battery as the a9. I also use the C2 button, which I have set up for manual focus assist. If you enjoy old lenses with a signature look, this is the system.”
Our conversation bounced from lenses to politics to sports, but I wanted to ask Burnett about a few of his most important images, particularly those that are considered “iconic,” and if he maintains a relationship with these images and the people photographed.
We spoke of his haunting 1973 photograph of a political prisoner in Chile and his return visit to Chile in 2013 attempting to find this man and others he photographed during these dark weeks.
“I had been arrested the day before in that same stadium, which was being used as a jail, but released, and I came back the next day with other journalists.”
They were being given a tour of the site where people were detained. Having been there the day before, Burnett asked guards about seeing a different part of the stadium as a group of detainees were being escorted by soldiers down a hallway. “I don’t think they expected journalists to be there but, in this moment, I took a few photos of this scared man, Daniel Céspedes.”
Did he look directly at you?
“Oh yes, I can’t imagine what he was seeing or thinking with soldiers and press around him, but definitely.”
That photo of Daniel Céspedes was distributed heavily, particularly in Europe. Perhaps that distribution saved his life. The photo has become a symbol for the fear that the Chilean military dictatorship instilled during the Pinochet years. I asked Burnett about his relationship to this and other photos that maintained a legacy long after their use as a news photo had expired.
“I’ve been an okay photographer, but not a great journalist. I’m a bad note taker and, over the years, I’ve done a poor job of getting names. Working in the magazine format, the necessity for that kind of information was never as strong as in a newspaper world, and I never got into that habit. There is a lack of a finite end to many of my stories, which is something I have to live with.”
But in 2013, Burnett returned to Chile to reunite with subjects of his photos from forty years earlier. Unfortunately, Céspedes did not want to revisit that part of his past and the meeting never happened, but Burnett did speak with and photograph other photo subjects from that time, many who had suffered greatly. “I used the Speed Graphic in an attempt to replicate the place and the people forty years later, to get something that speaks to the passage of time. It’s a little bit interpretive and personal, it was a very emotional reunion.”
Of his many photo stories, his work from the 1979 Iranian revolution is often noted as a high point, and I asked about a moment in which he photographed the Ayatollah Khomeini inside a small school room while thousands of people gathered outside the window to pay respects to the leader.
“That photo was a product of being patient and persistent. I had been taking photos for days of the people being ushered into this courtyard, photos from outside and from above, but decided the obvious thing was to try to get one from inside. They had given the job of dealing with the foreign press to an economics professor who really did not have much to say, so journalists stopped coming to his briefings, but I stayed and kept asking questions and explaining what I wanted to do. After about a week of this, instead of him saying come back tomorrow, he said, ‘Wait a minute.’ Five minutes later we walked through the school to a nondescript room and he asked me to take off my shoes. The door opened and outside the window was pushing and shoving and chaos, but strangely, in this room, it was absolute calm. Khomeini had just finished a tea. I grabbed my camera with a 35mm lens and was just like ‘bang, bang.’ I took a few shots and then slinked down in the opposite corner of the room, as invisible as possible. I was able to make two or three strong images and got one very close wide-angle while he was standing at the window. He left the room and I decided to stay. I put down my camera bag and then he returned quickly; I have this shot of him entering the room and coming about an inch away from tripping on my bag. Now that would have been a story! But by waiting and returning for days, I was able to get my shot from inside.”
About these photos, all taken with film, and often with Kodachrome, Burnett offered an insight worth sharing. “When you are working with film in this situation, you don’t see the image on the back of the screen or go back to your hotel and pull it up on a laptop. Your concern becomes finding someone to get the film on a plane to Paris or New York, and you really don’t know if you have a good shot until a week or ten days later. This is very hard to conceptualize for younger photographers, and I think makes you a different photographer, enabling a kind of self-confidence on the technical side.”
One sports photo that is memorable to anyone growing up in the 1980s is that of runner Mary Decker after her fall in the 3000-meter race at the 1984 Olympics. I asked Burnett how he got to such an ideal spot to capture the agony of that moment.
“I had been working the finish line most of that week and by Friday was so tired of all the photographers with their 25 cameras and tripods, with six Bogen clamps and double bars. I had had enough, I just wanted something else, so I walk down the track and find a bench with two guys. I ask if there was room for another. I had my 400mm f/2.8 and an 85mm and three or four cameras, but still only 36 shots per roll. So, I would use the 400mm as they rounded the turn of the track and grab the 85mm when they were right in front of me. This was a seven-lap race and you had 45 seconds before they came back around so you needed to know if you had enough film for another lap, or time for a rewind and film change. On the fourth lap, I shoot the 400mm, shoot the 85mm, and then look up because when you’re shooting an SLR you really don’t see what you’re photographing at that exact moment. I see Mary on the ground right in front of me and I grab the 400mm, manual focus it, and have this conversation with myself about ‘let’s take an extra beat to be sure the focus is sharp,’ and shoot six or seven frames before all the pool photographers came running up and blocked everyone’s view.”
I could have spoken with Burnett for hours, asking about his work on presidential campaigns, the Apollo mission launches, post-Katrina New Orleans, and countless other assignments. However, all good things do come to an end, but as we wrapped up our video chat, he quickly grabbed the Sony a6600 with the funky old cinema lens and took a portrait of me through the many virtual layers of our screens. True to his word, the center is tack sharp, the edges are gooey, and it’s an image I’ll treasure forever.
What is your most-used lens?
Besides that, what is your favorite lens?
What would be your dream lens?
Old glass—old cine lenses, Soviet era Helios/Zenit lenses, and my 1964 Nikkor 500 f/5 mirror lens, which was changed to a Canon mount and now has a Canon-to-Sony adapter attached
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming photographers?
"When the chance comes along, don't screw it up too bad. Do the best you can with what you've got and if it's good, it'll rise to the surface."