René Burri

René Burri

1933 - 2014 🖤

René Burri, September 2005, at Le Café du Passage, his ‘favourite watering hole’ in Paris, not far from Place de la Bastille where Catherine and I were ensconced .. we had met for an evening meal, I was a little early and he was a little late, a sweeping entrance into the café shouting to everyone, en anglais, ‘my car smells like burnt spaghetti’. We gathered jugs of water and fleet-footed a short distance up rue de Charonne to an open bonnet and a steaming radiator, slowly emptying our water into the reservoir, then left the car mostly on the footpath and returned to the café to eat at a small table one end of the bar within René’s reach of an array of malt whiskies, which he poured generously and regularly through the entire rendezvous.

 René was a good friend for a long time, way back from 1985 after I met his wife, Rosellina Bischof-Burri in Aotearoa New Zealand. A few years after Le Café du Passage, while at his apartment in Ivry-sur-Seine, bordering the southern end of Paris’ mighty Périphérique, he asked to swap a photograph. He wanted an image from my 2007 series, I SAW YOU [an artist book and exhibition], where a woman is casually seated on a rock with her dress open to the hips, sunbathing. He said he wanted to hang it on his wall between an image of his and another photographer too illustrious to mention .. from a pile, I chose a 1963 Havana image of Fidel Castro. It was a plastic print, not well known, with fixing marks, and a Magnum Photos caption on the verso, perfectly raw and real.