Rudy Burckhardt

Rudy Burckhardt (born April 6, 1914, Basel, Switzerland—died August 1, 1999, Searsmont, Maine, U.S.) was a Swiss-born American photographer, painter, and filmmaker who was considered among the most influential visual artists of the post-World War II era. His chief subjects were the architecture and people of New York City.

Burckhardt was fascinated by photography at any early age, building a pinhole camera when he was 15. In 1933 he went to London to begin the study of medicine, but he soon returned home—though not until having made numerous photographic studies of the London cityscape. In 1935, after having similarly photographed Paris, he moved to New York City, where his circle of friends came to include artists such as Willem de Kooning, Paul Bowles, and Aaron Copland. Burckhardt’s early street photography is notable for its unusual angle, which captured crowds of people from the knee down as they walked the streets of New York City. He also photographed the city’s skyscrapers, its advertisements, newsstands, barbershops, and the other places and things that made up the urban landscape.

While he was an active photographer, Burckhardt became interested in filmmaking and made his first film in 1936. He shot his short films (none exceeded 30 minutes) with a 16-mm camera and collaborated with his large network of friends—poet and dance critic Edwin Denby and artists Red Grooms, Jane Freilicher, Joseph Cornell, Alex Katz, Yvonne Jacquette, and Larry Rivers, among them. Many of his films, like his photographs, focused on urban life (e.g., What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street [1956, with Cornell]; Central Park in the Dark, New York City [1985, with Charles Ives, Christopher Sweet, and Yoshiko Chuma and her School of Hard Knocks]). Burckhardt often incorporated a jazz soundtrack or poets—such as John Ashbery (Mounting Tension, 1950; Ostensibly, 1989), Kenneth Koch (In Bed, 1986), and Frank O’Hara (Automotive Story, 1954)—reading their poems aloud as narration.

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Burckhardt served in the U.S. military during World War II and became a U.S. citizen in 1944. He often traveled to and worked in places such as Mexico and Trinidad, but during the fertile period after the war he became much better known for his black-and-white studies of New York than for images made elsewhere. Though his reputation stemmed primarily from his photographic work, Burckhardt also pursued painting in the 1940s and studied at the school of artist Amédée Ozenfant in 1948–49. In 1948 he had first exhibits for both his photography and his paintings. During the 1950s and ’60s Burckhardt was employed as a photographer by gallerists such as Leo Castelli to document their gallery exhibitions and by ARTNews magazine, for which he photographed artists at work in their studios.

Beginning in 1956, Burckhardt spent most summers in Maine and pursued his art in New York during the remainder of the year. He began teaching filmmaking and painting in 1967 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a position he held through 1975. By the time he committed suicide at age 85, Burckhardt had created some 100 films and was a well-known painter and photographer.