Rudy Burckhardt

The Swiss photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt (1914 - 1999) came via London to New York in 1935 from his Swiss home town of Basle and found himself overwhelmed by the American metropolis. "The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and the people in the street astonished me", he wrote of the city that became his home for the rest of his life. Though comparatively little known, Burckhardt is increasingly being recognized as an outstanding 20th-century photographer. His New York street scenes of the 1940s are classic. In the 1950s, Burckhardt took many portraits of artists for Art News, some of them being his friends - Willem de Kooning, Alex Katz, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and others. Burckhardt found photography too monumental, "because when it gets printed and comes out a picture it becomes like a fact, you know". He preferred the fleetingness of a film, where "things come and go", and often used the photo and the movie camera simultaneously on his tours around the streets of New York and later the forests of Maine.