David Burnett ’68 Captures Moments, Miles, and Memories

David Burnett ’68

David Burnett has photographed gun battles in the streets of Iran, Olympic divers seemingly paused in mid-air, every president since John F. Kennedy. He’s chronicled D-Day anniversaries in Normandy and authored “Soul Rebel,” a book of Bob Marley images. He’s won more national and international awards for his work behind the lens than there are contact sheets in the National Archives.

And yet he can still recall what was “probably the only event I didn’t take a camera to in four years” as a CC student: the famed 1967 Homecoming concert by The Doors.

“Photography is about memory,” Burnett says. “It’s really about trying to be a historian, as much as anything.”

The Doors memories aside, his college days come alive as he sits in front of a laptop clicking through film shots he recently scanned into electronic format, delight spreading over his face as he points out classmates at a late-1960s football game.

“Jim Garcia. … Steve Sabol. … Rosie the trainer. … Gordon Price. …That’s Judy the adorable DG cheerleader.

“I can recognize people I haven’t seen in years!”

He pauses, lost in thought.

“I’ve got a daughter who’s 27, and she might think she has some idea of what our lives were like in our 20s but she doesn’t really. I’m not even sure the pictures do such a great job of describing that, or telling that, but there is something — there’s definitely something about being able to look through these pictures.”

An American soldier reading a letter from home, Lang Vei, South Vietnam, 1971

National Stadium, Santiago, Chile, 1973 During the Chilean coup d’état, prisoners were brought to the National Stadium for processing and interrogation. Burnett went back to visit the stadium last year with some of the former prisoners. “Everybody said, ‘it’s amazing they didn’t kill you,’” he says now of his presence there in 1973. “I didn’t even think about it. … You do have to have a pretty good sense of what your own capabilities are and how to operate. The world has gotten a whole lot more dangerous in the last 10 or 15 years, for sure. There used to be a little bit of protection with a camera, not much, but a little bit. Now you’re just increasingly a target as much as anything, and that’s terrible.”

Bob Marley, at his home “Tuff Gong,” Kingston, Jamaica, 1976 Burnett spent a week in Jamaica working on a reggae story when the musical genre was just taking off outside the Caribbean; the last day of that trip was spent with Marley at his Kingston home. Burnett says of the reggae pioneer, “I’d gone to Jamaica not even really knowing who he was, and came away thinking he was, indeed, someone very special.”

Bob Marley, Kingston, Jamaica, 1976 Burnett on Marley, whom he interviewed and photographed at Marley’s Kingston home: “I realized, in the midst of shooting these pictures, that I was hearing the voice of someone who was wise, someone who had wisdom. From a tough background to such poetry, it was amazing to see what this young man (he was a year older than me) was able to do.”

Summer Olympics, London, 2012 Handball may be one of the fastest Olympic games there is, but Burnett says it’s hockey, which he’s been photographing since CC played at the Broadmoor arena in 1967, that’s still challenging for him. “Too fast!” he comments. “Way too fast!”

Iranian Revolution, Tehran, Iran, 1978 Burnett arrived in Tehran the day after Christmas 1978, unaware of the degree of political unrest around him. Within hours, he was on the streets, in the middle of a gunbattle. “Every burial became a political event,” he notes, “where the shah and the U.S. were railed against.”

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Burnett grew up in Salt Lake City. When it came time for college, he applied to Stanford University and Pomona College in California. And CC.

“The kicker was I was always able to say I went east to school.”

As a first-year student, he tried to join the yearbook staff but got brushed aside by the then-official yearbook photographer, so he started paving his own path. He shot photos of campus athletes and ended up working for the student newspaper, the Tiger.

“They had an account with Stewart Photo, down on Tejon Street,” he explains. “And I’d drop the film off and get little prints made, and in they’d go, into the paper. Very analog. Extremely analog. And that’s OK, because I don’t know that there are any hard drives from 1965 that are still working.

“Look at my film, they might not be great pictures, but at least I’ve got them.”

In his junior year, Burnett declared a major in political science, and Professor Fred Sondermann became a big influence on him. “[Sondermann] was great. I did once actually see him typing on two different typewriters at the same time. He was that good. He was the guy who should have been what Henry Kissinger was — the world would have been a better place if Fred Sondermann had worked for Nixon instead of Henry.”

Burnett headed off to Time magazine for an internship between his junior and senior years, and had 11 pictures published that summer. After his 1968 graduation, he took a three-month obligatory trip to Europe, but jokes that he wasn’t into journalism mode yet. “I was in Prague about a week before the Russians rolled in and I don’t know why I didn’t feel a greater obligation to shoot pictures. … I shot a few pictures but I don’t really have anything.”

Summer Olympics, London, 2012 Burnett catches this image of Britain’s Alistair Brownlee winning gold in the Hyde Park men’s triathlon with a time of 1 hour, 46 minutes, 25 seconds. Burnett says most of his Olympic photo subjects “are anything but the gold medalists.”

Summer Olympics, London, 2012 Sometimes when Burnett shoots sports photos, like this one at the diving trials, what sticks with him most has nothing to do with the image he captures. Of the 1992 Olympic opening ceremony in Barcelona, he says, “The thing I still remember the most about that particular moment was the sound of 80,000 people going [deep breath in]. That was cool. There are those kinds of things that you can’t capture. Like that sound of 80,000 people gasping. That was a real gasp.”

The White House lectern, Washington, D.C., 2003 Burnett has photographed every president since John F. Kennedy. As he explains, it’s not always an easy gig: “I can remember struggling in Little Rock, having waited for the results when Clinton beat Bush in ’92 — which camera do you use? — because they were moving around so fast and you gotta get Clinton with Gore and then Clinton with Gore and Hillary. And then Clinton with Hillary and Tipper, and then Tipper and Hillary are over here, and where’d Gore go? … This is what’s great about pictures: You can look at the pictures and those pictures will remind you of things that you’ve totally forgotten.”

Penn Relays, University of Pennsylvania’s Franklin Field, Philadelphia, 1996 Burnett catches 1990s champion pole-vaulter Lawrence Johnson (aka LoJo) as he clears the bar.

Harold Baumgartner, St. Augustine, Florida, 2004 Burnett first began photographing World War II D-Day veterans in 1974. This image features Harold Baumgartner, who was wounded five times on June 6, 1944. These reunions in particular offer Burnett opportunities to reflect. He says, “You keep putting these little markers down in your life, and I started to really understand that the first time in 1974, when I was — what? 27 — and I attended the first of what would become many D-Day reunions up in Normandy.”

Depth of Field

Even with a body of work that speaks to the last 40 years in a very cogent way and includes credits in such magazines as Life, National Geographic, and Time, Burnett is humble about his impact. He is, however, clear about the power an image can wield.

One such instance was in 1972, during his time in South Vietnam, where Burnett was changing film in one of his cameras when fellow war photographer Nick Ut shot the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm girl” photo. The hospital where Ut took the girl — named Kim Phuc — didn’t want to admit her, Burnett says, because her burns were so bad and hospital officials feared she wouldn’t survive.

But Ut’s photo captured the moment. And people around the world were asking questions.

“The fact that after a few days people wanted to know who it was, and they went back and got her moved to the right hospital — it absolutely saved her life.”

In 2012, Burnett met in Toronto with Ut and others who were in Vietnam that day, to honor Phuc and the 40th anniversary of the bombing. Phuc is married now, with two sons, and runs a foundation for children victimized by war.

“I’d seen her once in Washington, but I hadn’t really seen her in 40 years,” Burnett says, “and then we were all back in the same room together, sharing stories about it.

“You just realize that is the power a picture can have.”

Effective Aperture

The Sochi Winter Olympics in February were Burnett’s 10th. This year, he was on assignment for the International Olympic Committee, but these trips make up just a small part of his work these days. Based in New York City, he’s co-founder of Contact Press Images, one of the few independent photojournalism agencies that produces “in-depth photographic essays of pressing global concern.”

He’s also a collaborator in the Facing Change: Documenting America nonprofit collective. The work encompasses a visual online project, which he says harkens back to the photography program the Farm Security Administration oversaw in the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. Facing Change’s hope today, he says, is to document the social issues of the time, many of which are economic and financial.

“There are things that you can do with pictures,” he adds. “Video can be very powerful, movies can be very powerful, but there’s something that anyone with eyes and a bit of a soul can relate to when it’s a still photograph.”