Photojournalism Since Vietnam

David Burnett Bio

David Burnett is a photojournalist with more than 4 decades of experience covering the news and tempo of our age. In 1976 he co-founded Contact Press Images in New York, and for the next three decades he traveled extensively, working for most of the major photographic and general interest magazines in the U.S. and Europe. His work encompasses News, Feature, and People pictures, as well as landscapes and scenics. He is known as someone who can, no matter how challenging the assignment, return with The Picture.

Burnett is the recipient of the Magazine Photographer of the Year from the Pictures of the Year Competition, the World Press Photo of the Year, and the Robert Capa Award from the Overseas Press Club, to name but a few. In February of 2006, he was again awarded several major awards for work done in the previous year: First Place in Presidential category in the White House News Photographers’ Association annual Eyes of History; and a 1st Place in Best of Photojournalism for a Portrait of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. In an issue of American Photo magazine Burnett was named one of the “100 Most Important People in Photography.”

Alon Reininger Bio

A unique historical awareness and an ability for sensing political change has consistently put Alon Reininger at the forefront of world events. In his elegant, documentary style, subjects are permitted to speak for themselves, their anger, humor and pathos remaining entirely unadorned for the camera.

Initially a commercial photographer and assistant cameraman in Israel, Reininger’s career in photojournalism began during the 1973 October War between Egypt and Israel, which he covered for UPI. From 1974 to 1975, he worked for Gamma’s New York office, before he began to travel the world, covering political and social change in Southern Africa and the Middle East from 1976 to 1980, in Central America from 1979 to 1983 and in China in 1984 and 1988.

Reininger is perhaps best known for his work on the AIDS crisis, which he began shooting in 1982, when the disease was barely known outside of medical circles. Since that time, he has systematically shot AIDS patients and the disease’s horrific spread in America. His work on AIDS has received numerous awards, including ASMP’s Philippe Halsman Award, the UN World Health Organization’s “All for Health, Health for All Award,” the World Press Photo Foundation’s “Premier Award” and the Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism.

Exhibition Statement

This exhibition offered a view of photojournalism at its apex. The critically acclaimed exhibition consisted of an award-winning body of work by the photographers of Contact Press Images, the renowned international picture agency. Published on the pages and covers of magazines worldwide, this striking collection of images represented some of the very best of color reportage from 1970 to 1990.

The images range from a light-hearted view of a worker high on the Statue of Liberty, gently kissing her hair, to the horrific scene of a badly burned Iraqi soldier taken during the Gulf War. A picture of Lady Diana bestowing a wedding kiss on Prince Charles appears amid images of war, revolution, famine, and the Olympics. A series of contact sheet enlargements shows the Ayatollah Khomeni on his return to Tehran in 1979. One alcove at the Schneider Museum was devoted to a series of elaborately staged celebrity portraits by American photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Back to Past Exhibitions