
Fidel Castro speaking at the Teatro Chaplin, Havana
<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
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- 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.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- René Burri
Artist

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.
Full artist profile →More
More by René Burri
White Schoolboy, Cape Town
1968 · Gelatin silver print
Salvador da Bahia, Brazil
1966 · Gelatin silver print
Bahia, Brazil
1966 · Gelatin silver print
Florida, USA
1966 · Gelatin silver print
Bahia, Brazil
1966 · Gelatin silver print
Autostrada del Sole, Italy
1966 · Gelatin silver print
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- René Burri
- Year
- 1963
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- 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
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified





