I Want To Take Pictureby Bill Burke
The resurgence of interest in photobooks that are long out of print has sparked a race for reprints. Today's publishers have suddenly realised the huge potential of important volumes that never saw wide distribution. Twin Palms Publishers have just released a reprint of Bill Burke's seminal book of 1987 "I Want To Take Picture" as well as his less well known 1995 followup "Mine Fields".
"I Want To Take Picture" documents one of the twentieth centuries darkest episodes, the aftermath of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. But it is also Burke's travel journal. His polaroid photographs are scrawled with personal recollections and hark bark to the work of french colonial photographers entering Cambodia a century earlier. Burke begins with refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border and retraces their footsteps in reverse. Photographs of masses in refugee camps are replaced by those of landmine victims, forces still in combat, and a people under siege. It is important as a photobook as it is an early example of a photographer embedding themselves into a conflict out of compassion and necessity. The result is a warmth and power that was rarely seen in the clinical photographs of the neighbouring just ended Vietnam war.
Bill Burke Biography
1943 Born
1966 BA - Middlebury College, Art History
1968 BFA - Rhode Island School of Design, Photography
1970 MFA - Rhode Island School of Design, Photography
Selected Exhibitions
2005 Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York (solo)
2005 Recent Portraits Howard Yezerski Gallery, Two person show with Robert Cumming
2004 The Open Book, A History of Photographic Books from 1878 to the Present, The Hassleblad Center2003 AMFAR Aids Research Photo Potfolio
2002 Fire / Iron, Deer Hunter to Squirrel Hunter, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Pittsburgh (solo)
2001 Signs of The Market. Cambodian hand painted signs, B’s Photos and sign collection, MillS Gallery, Boston Ctr for the Arts, Boston
2001 Somewhat Corrupt, Computer Art Show, Plaza Gallery, Fordham University, New York City
2001 Local Heroes, Tera Museum of Art, Chicago
2000 Reflections in a Glass Eye, Works From the Collection of the International Center for Photography, ICP Gallery, New York
2000 American Perspectives: Photographs from the Polaroid Collection, Tokyo Photo Museum, Tokyo
1999 Blind Spot Issue 13, Robert Mann Gallery, New York
1999 Crackpot Theorists and Terminal Technology, List Visual Arts center, M I T cambridge Ma
1998 Rethinking Artist's Books Univ Art Gallery, Central Mich. University
1997 The Garden of Eden, Noorderlight Photofestival, Groningen, Netherlands
1997 Harry Callahan and his Students, High Museum of Fine Arts, Atlanta Ga
1996 Transformation of the Work in Art, Offset Artists books and prints, Fosdick-Nelson Gallery, School of Art and Design, Alfred, New York
