Talking Photography with David Burnett
If you're reading this, you probably know who David Burnett is.
Ken - “You did your first Olympics in Los Angeles back in 1984. How are you approaching these Olympics differently?”
David - “In 1984 it was all new. I had been to a few big track meets, probably not any swimming or gymnastics. I kind of leapt into it all. It was a lot more OJT, “ on the job training”, and trying to figure out just by looking around a place where the pictures might be.”
“I know people say, and I basically agree, that you need to do some research. Arriving completely fresh at a place without having any idea what’s going on... its just not professional. On the other hand, there are times I think when you get an absolutely fresh view of something and it isn’t terrible that you have to think on your feet. To be completely in the moment. You don’t know where all of the secret little places are to go shoot from. You don’t know where all of the locations are that give you some kind of special advantage. There are times when you can make-up for that by giving it that once over and just reacting. That’s sometimes one of the things that photographers do best. To just react to a situation. We find ourselves always wanting to be prepared and that’s good, but there are times when you just have to see something and react to it.”
“I think we’re trained to be pretty snappy on our feet. I won’t say that I always like to arrive late and be clueless, but the Mary Decker picture in a way was a product, not so much of great forethought as it was of just being fed-up with being at the finish line area being surrounded by people that had fourteen cameras, mounted on tripods with clamps and ball-heads and everything. I just wanted to get away from the mess.”
“I’ve always tried to see what everybody else is doing and then see if there wasn’t someway to be on the other side of the field or the other side of the lane or just in a different place.”
“To give yourself a chance to make a different picture is the hardest thing and sometimes its very easy to just go along in a very passive way. You just kind of say, Well that’s where the picture is so I guess I’ll go to the finish line.”
“It’s kind of like when people use to say in the computer business, Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but it doesn’t mean that in the end you’re going to be proud of those pictures.”
Ken - “So right now you’re going over to the Water Cube. What are the two or three elements that you look for when seeing a venue for the first time?”
David - “Well, this place comes with a lot of advance PR. I supposing it’s going to have a look that’s way different than anyplace I’ve ever seen. The swimmers Dara Torres and Michael Phelps were saying this morning that its the coolest place they’ve ever swum.”
“I don’t know if that’s going to nessicarily translate into pictures.”
“I am hoping to look at the underwater windows. I’m not a scuba diver. I’ve never really had a tank on my back. I’m not a great underwater photographer, but I love the idea of peering underwater and seeing the action that happens to divers and swimmers. They say this year that there maybe a window over at water polo venue. That could be pretty exciting.”
“Its hard to know what you’re going to get out of these things. Sometimes you just have to go look. That for me is what makes these things fun, the exploration and discovery of something completely new. Now, I guess you could say that since I made some pictures four years ago (in Athens) this isn’t completely new, but even if its similar situation, what you see can be very different.”
“Nothing is ever the same twice. So you may have some idea of what may work, or what worked before, but that’s not necessarily going to deliver this time. So you have to tweak each little moment that you’re given in the new situation and try to make something out of that.”
Ken - “You’ve built a reputation on standing in a group of 100 photographers and pulling out an image that is somehow better, different, or stands out from the pack. Can you do this today now that the bar has been leveled by all of the digital innovation?”
David - “Well it is very hard to make a picture that... when you have a group of several hundred photographers, and very good photographers too let me say... This is probably the greatest single gathering of good magazine and newspaper photographers in the world. I can’t think of anything else that is like the Olympics. It draws in a lot of people like me that aren’t just sports photographers, but do other things.”
“So you’re in a pretty high-test realm here.”
“That being said, there’s always a way to look at something differently, and you have to kind of (in a way) tunnel vision yourself into looking around and imagining. Much of it is really about anticipation. Anything to do with sports is about anticipation. So you need to keep looking in a very fresh way at your venue. Looking at what the possibilities are.”
“Trying to imagine what it could be like from up there or down here. What could you do that will give you a perspective that’s a little different than anything that anybody else got?”
“It doesn’t always work, but you’ve got to at least try, and even if you’re just trying to push yourself. One year, I’ll shoot with the 4x5, one year its the 120 cameras, whatever. Its not really about the gear, than the gear forcing me to look a certain way or shoot a certain way and trying to come up with something that’s going to surprise me.”
“I have to try and please myself first and then I’ll worry about everybody else.”
Ken - “We’ve got a unique advantage. We have Robert Pledge (who will be editing our work) here, who co-founded Contact with you, we have an office and a team in place. What do we have to come up with to stand out from the pack?”
David - “As you said, Its harder with so many good photographers present. It remains a constant challenge to make a picture that are going to stand above the thousands of pictures that are going to made by all of the other photographers here, very good, very talented people.”
“I think the one thing that works for us is to try and not feel the pressure. First of all we don’t have the pressure that we have to get the winners. We want to get maybe Michael Phelps, maybe Dara Torres. There’s a few of these name people that would be nice to end up with something of them that would be meaningful, but by and large I see what we do as much more interpretive than it is absolutely informational.”
“There are a lot of people here that are going to make great pictures, of the results, and I think for us the challenge and our strong point is trying to get those other little moments that may be more telling about sport or maybe more delivering a sense of the elegance and the power of these really great athletes, than it is strictly worrying about who won.”
“In most cases it doesn’t matter who is in my pictures.”
“There are a few times when I’ve gotten lucky. With the Mary Decker picture (tearsheets), clearly that was a news event and it was a picture that had a long shelf life for other reasons.”
Ken - “We’ve kind of used the standard (at Contact) of the daily picture, the weekly picture and then you have the picture that every magazine is going to want to run in their year-end issue. The Mary Decker image hit all those cylinders. That’s our goal isn’t it, to make the pictures that are going to last a year, not just an hour or a day or ten minutes with these news cycles we have today?”
David - “You have to get beyond the news cycle, because its true that between the internet and the existing publications the deadlines... well, AP use to say that there was a deadline every minute, and with the new world that we are living in there’s just a constant rope of deadline that almost never breaks.”
“If you can make a couple of pictures in the coming weeks that in a month or a year people will look back and say ‘Oh wow, that really does talk about the Beijing games’ then you’ve done something.”
“I had another moment that really worked and it was just total chance, of the chinese diver Fu Mingxia in Barcelona at that amazing outdoor swimming pool.”
“There will probably never be another outdoor swimming event at the Olympics.”
“Everything now is lit and created for television. You don’t have that kind of look. You don’t have the sky. In this case the way the perspective just looked out across the city of Barcelona. That was a very special place. I made a nice picture and it also happened that she won a gold medal, so that was one of those rare accidents where the gold medalist was also the gold medal picture.”
“Now days we are stuck in this technical world where everything is under-lit or not lit in a dramatic sense. They want it to look just OK on television. Unfortunately, when that happens it means that everything you’re looking at in terms of the pure visual quality tend to get watered down.”
“Its really about standing in the right place, getting your camera there and knowing when to push the button.”
“I’m hoping that the venues they have here will bring some surprises like that.”
Ken - “We both remember when you’d get off the elevator on the Margaret Bourke-White floor in the Time/Life Building and you could chat with Carl Mydans, or Alfred Eisenstaedt on your way to the Time/Life Lab, I was thinking about the young history of the art of photojournalism. You are one degree away from the founders. Can you share a story from that time?”
David - “One of the more moving moments I can remember was in October of 1980. I
had just gotten my first Canon A-1 camera. Which was the very first camera with a LED read-out in the viewfinder. It was the first computer camera. It had a little series of red figures in there and when you pressed the button the meter would say ‘f8 125’ and it wasn’t just matching the needle with the other little needle. This was exciting because we were all of the sudden starting to think we were in this new computer age, and it was going to enable us to do all sorts of interesting things.”
“I was up in the photographer’s lounge with my brand new Canon A-1. It was about five in the afternoon and Eisie walked out of his office and was on his way to the subway.”
“He had his overcoat on and was carrying two big brown shopping bags which probably had about five million dollars worth of prints in them. He was heading back to his apartment in Queens as he did everyday when he was in New York.
“He stopped and kind of wandered in and said,
‘Mr. Burnett (in a somewhat german accent) you are such a young and handsome looking fellow.’ Eisie, he was always right there with the traditional classic european gentility, he said ‘Well, what do you have there?’ and I showed him this camera and said ‘Hey Eisie, its the new Canon A-1, look at it.’ He put the camera up to his eye and I kind of helped him press the button so he could see the meter light-up inside and he was absolutely flabbergasted by what he saw and he said, ‘This is unbelievable!’ That was one of his great words, unbelievable. ‘Oh my god I would really like something like this.’
“I’m thinking all you’d have to do is hint that you wanted one and they’d probably send you three of them overnight.”
“What was amazing about that moment is that this was the most new, modern 35mm camera in existence and some kind of little light went off in Eisie’s head and he said, ‘You know this reminds me of the cameras we use to use.’ I’m sure he was just so struck by the mondernaty of this camera that it flashed him back to how he use to work in the twenties and he said, ‘We use to use the Plaubel Makina. Of course everywhere we went it was either in tuxedo or tails.’
“It was kind of a dig, of course, all of use were always dressed in jeans, something less than really well dressed...and he padded the left side of his jacket and said, ‘This side unexposed,’ padded his right side, ‘this side exposed. We’d walk in like this (leaning to the left) and walk out like that (leaning to the right).’
“Because of the weight of these glass plates, and they’d maybe take eight or ten to a shoot, and he held up this Canon, which for a moment became that Plaubel Makina and he said, ‘You know the Plaubel Makina was so difficult. You had to open the back, pull the dark slide, focus on the ground glass, close the back, put in the glass plate, cock the shutter, pull the dark slide, take the picture and by then the son-of-a-bitch had usually moved! Which is why we had so many out of focus pictures.’
“At that moment for me a little light went off, and then I finally understood that it wasn’t just the act of shooting a picture, you didn’t have the embiqunes of having two or three cameras. You had your camera. You had a glass plate that was probably the film speed of 10, 20 or maybe 25 asa. Lens that were not very fast and shooting in marginal lighting situations you had to guess at what the exposure was, and for that moment it was just magical being in his presence. All of the sudden I was back in 1928 as he was making pictures in Germany.”
“Then one of the other young photographers who was there asked one of these absolutely ridiculous stupid questions like, ‘Well, gee Eisie what’s your favorite aperture?’ and it kind of took him out of that zone and brought him back. I’ve never forgiven that guy. I won’t mention who it is, but I have never forgiven that guy for not just letting that moment bake in its own historical beauty.”
“It was something. I didn’t know them well, but I knew Eisie. I new Carl Mydans. Gjon Mili, who was this amazing photographer, had a little bit of a scary continence. He had a sort of Einstein flash of grey hair and I must say when my hair gets long I’m starting to look a little bit more like him. He was always furtively be-bopping around the 28th floor offices. I didn’t really know much about him. I must say I was remiss in my knowledge of who the other photographers were. I knew who Eisie, and Mydans were a number of other people, but Gjon Mili was really an incredible talent. Just a well of intelligence as applied to photography.”
“That’s what strikes me most about young photographers now. They have actually no desire to know about people. They know Jim Nachtwey, maybe they know Salgado and they’ll know Annie Leibovitz, maybe they even know Cartier-Bresson, but everybody from Phillip Jones-Griffiths to the early LIFE and LOOK magazine photographers and people in Europe that didn’t really work for the american press who were terrific in their work. Its very difficult and I must say that I try to have patience for it, but I just can’t imagine.”
“I met a young agency photographer in Athens one morning at the kayaking and I was standing on the bridge trying to get a few little serene moments of these one and two man kayaks going in and out of the waterway, they would pass right under you, under a bridge and he was standing there with his three digital cameras, and he’s a very good action photographer, probably in his early thirties and I shot a picture as one of these boats went by and kind of shrugged my shoulders and said to myself, ‘Well, not bad, but its not like anything that John Zimmerman made.”
“He looked at me like, who is John Zimmerman? I said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of John Zimmerman, probably the greatest sports photographer of the last half of the twentieth century.’ He just kind of shrugged his shoulders like gee, I don’t know who that is. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how you could possibly be a sports photographer and not know every great picture that John Zimmerman made.”
“He did it without autofocus. He did it without 18 frame a second motordrives. Basically John Zimmerman did all of these things and he did it at a time when the mechanics of the cameras required you to do so much more work. Just to get a remote camera to fire you had to run wires. Radios didn’t come into the game until much later.”
“It bothers me with all of the talent that’s floating around, there’s a lot of great photographers, I definitely see a lot of great talent walking around, but it does bother me in many ways that they are oblivious to the people that went before them in this profession. They don’t know what has come before and they just think, Oh, aren’t I great.”
“The problem with being your own editor, and getting those pictures out is that its very easy to think you’re a great photographer because you’re seeing your work right away. It can easily cloud your judgement about what is good and what isn’t.”
Ken - “Twenty or thirty years from now people will be looking at photographs to try and put the changes that have happened in China into perspective. I mean Beijing today is nothing like it was when I first came her in 1989. I think of Zimmerman’s picture of the swedish high jumper, just a portrait really. Are those kind of pictures being made today?”
David - “I’m sure a lot of people are shooting those, “look the other direction” photos, but at the same time the market forces are defiantly geared toward turning out the big deal pictures of the big events, the big winners and the big losers.”
“I think it does open up a possibility, you and I, even if we don’t consciously think about it but subconsciously we’re looking for all of those other little moments.”
“Even for the historical perspective we could really use a guy like Dilip Mehta or Frank Fournier who would never go to an Olympic venue. Who have a great knack for just drifting around the city of Beijing at the time of the Olympics capturing what that’s about. “
“Whether its the force of the party on display, the enormous growth in wealth that has happened here. Just things that were absolutely unimaginable when we were last here. “
“If we don’t remember it, what must anyone else remember? The place doesn’t resemble that country. Its really moved on, and its true that the photographers making all of the trips here over the last couple of years, Joe McNally, John Huet, just to name a couple. Those people might even be the ones that make the pictures that we’ll all be thinking about.”
“You make decisions about what you can do. You only have so much time to spend and I’m sorry I haven’t been able to spend more time in the days leading up to the Olympics, because its really something. I got out of a taxi yesterday in front of this gigantic shopping center on the other side of the Olympic Green and I look around and the only place I’ve ever seen anything like this is Shinjuku in Tokyo and Las Vegas. Big brassy lights, big stuff going on, restaurants, signs in neon, its not the grey, drowsy, pre-Tiananmen square of 1988. Which is the place I remember.
"Its a funny thing you know, you try to figure out with all of the things you’ve seen in the world through the course of a photographer and as a photographer essentially as a historian to understand what are all of the changes going on around the world and how many years is a generation anymore and so much has change here in the last twenty years. These kids, the volunteers that are working here in their late teens, twenties or even early thirties. They don’t even know or have any knowledge of what that older country was.”
"That in a way is what’s daunting in the task we have in trying to capture some of that growth, evolution and change of what China is about."
"It’s not just a track meet that we’re doing here."
Wow. That was such an enjoyable read. Thank you for sharing the conversation. I look forward to your updates.
Best,
Matt Miller
Posted by: Matt Miller | August 06, 2008 at 06:57 PM
Many thanks for such a great story. Love reading the info from the links also. I look forward to more updates.
Thanks,
Thomas Shea
Posted by: Thomas Shea | August 22, 2008 at 10:38 AM
I loved reading that. Thanks for taking the time to post all that.
Posted by: Matthew Zimmerman | August 22, 2008 at 12:23 PM