David Burnett. Man Without Gravity

About

David Burnett has covered every Summer Games since 1984 - from Los Angeles, to Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London. He also made two forays into the Winter Games: in 2002 in his hometown of Salt Lake City and in Sochi in 2014. His acclaimed sports photographs have been highly awarded by the World Press Photo Foundation, the International Olympic Committee and the China News Photographers’ Association, among others.

“I have the luxury of never having been the photographer who was relied upon to get the winner in that victorious pose,” Burnett says. “So many photographers have great experience shooting those sports that I might only see once every four, or even twelve years. My mission, I feel, is to study the sport, the motion, the players and to get pictures that spectators may never witness by simply sitting there observing the games.“

As one of the world’s most respected photojournalists working today, David Burnett has photographed in over 75 countries and witnessed numerous significant historical events spanning his nearly 50 year career. Burnett launched his career as an intern at Time magazine in 1967. From 1970 to 1972, he covered the Vietnam War for Time and Life. In 1975, he co-founded the renowned agency Contact Press Images in New York, and has produced photographic essays for Time, Life, Fortune, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, among many others. His awards include “Magazine Photographer of the Year” from the Pictures of the Year Competition, the ”World Press Photo of the Year”, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club, to name but a few. He is the author of E-motion: The Spirit of Sport (1997); Soul Rebel, An Intimate Portrait of Bob Marley (2009); 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World with an introduction by Christiane Amanpour (2010); and more recently of L’Homme Sans Gravité (2015)