Fidel Castro speaking at the Teatro Chaplin, Havana

Fidel Castro speaking at the Teatro Chaplin, Havana

René BurriWW-1963-120176
1963·Gelatin silver print·Image/paper: 20.8 × 31.5 cm (8 1/4 × 12 7/16 in.); Mount: 56 × 45.9 cm (22 1/16 × 18 1/8 in.)

<p>A member of the photographic cooperative Magnum, which enabled photographers to retain creative control of their images, René Burri traveled the world on reportage assignments. In 1963 he journeyed to Cuba for the American magazine Look—along with the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who was reporting for <em>Life</em> (no Americans were allowed entry)—and photographed Che Guevara and Fidel Castro as well as everyday citizens. This photograph of Castro, dwarfed by an arrangement of weapons and flowers, was included in Burri’s first one-man show, at the Art Institute in 1967; two years later, the museum acquired 24 of his photographs.</p>

Catalogue

Year
1963
Dimensions
Image/paper: 20.8 × 31.5 cm (8 1/4 × 12 7/16 in.); Mount: 56 × 45.9 cm (22 1/16 × 18 1/8 in.)

Artist

René Burri
René Burri

Photography

René Burri was a Swiss photographer and photojournalist whose color and black-and-white work documented postwar politics, architecture, and urban life across Latin America, Asia, and Europe from the 1950s onward. He photographed pivotal moments in Cold War history and the built environment with a formal precision that balanced journalistic urgency with compositional rigor. His archive spans decades of assignment work for major international publications and remains a significant record of the second half of the twentieth century.

Zurigo, Switzerland

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Bahia, Brazil

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Autostrada del Sole, Italy

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Record

Verified by WattsOS
Year
1963
Dimensions
Image/paper: 20.8 × 31.5 cm (8 1/4 × 12 7/16 in.); Mount: 56 × 45.9 cm (22 1/16 × 18 1/8 in.)
Watts ID
WW-1963-120176

Source

Source
aic
Status
verified

Artist

René Burri

René Burri

Photography

View artist profile →