Burnett won the 1980 World Press Photo award with a photo of a Cambodian woman holding her child in her arms waiting for food to be distributed at a refugee camp (1980)One of Burnett's historical photos: Ruhollah Khomeini comes to Iran.Burnett at the book signing for "Soul Rebel".
David Burnett (born 1946)[1] is an American magazine photojournalist based in Washington, D.C. His work from the 1979 Iranian revolution was published extensively in Time (including its "Man of the Year" portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini).
David Burnett was born in 1946,[citation needed] in Holladay, Utah. His parent are Mr. and Mrs. Ted Burnett. He attended Oakwood School, Olympus Junior High, and Olympus high school. During a summer job at optical store in Salt Lake City he developed an interest for lenses, and his first published photos were in the yearbook of his high school.[5] Burnett said that he knew he wanted to be a photographer from the experience working on the yearbook and that within a year or two he became a stringer for a local weekly and occasionally sold pictures of Friday night basketball to The Salt Lake Tribune.[6]
On June 8, 1972. Burnett was one of the photojournalists present at Trảng Bàng in Tây Ninh Province when Nick Ut of the Associated Press captured his famous image of the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc and some other children fleeing a napalm attack. Two South Vietnamese Skyraider aircraft went off course and dropped the incendiary bombs near the journalists, resulting in the deaths of two children and inflicting serious burns on others, including Kim Phúc. Burnett also photographed the scene.[7][additional citation(s) needed]
After two years in Vietnam, he joined the French photo agency Gamma, traveling the world for its news department for two years.[citation needed]
In 1975,[citation needed] he co-founded a new photo agency, Contact Press Images,[6] in New York City. For the last three decades he has traveled extensively, working for most of the major magazines in the United States and Europe.[citation needed]
In 2009, National Geographic published Burnett's 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World. The books contains his photography taken in Iran during the 1979 overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.[10]
Also that year, Burnett published another book of intimate, unpublished images he took of reggae singer Bob Marley, titled Soul Rebel.[11]
In 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the first human mission to the Moon, he published We Choose to Go to the Moon, a book of photos taken around the launch pad in Cape Canaveral.[citation needed]
In October 2022, The Outsiders House Museum and its executive director Danny Boy O'Connor published the book The Outsiders ‘Rare and Unseen’, which contains 148 photos by Burnett who was the on-set photographer of the film The Outsiders (1983). O'Connor said: “We originally got the first lot of photos and then [Burnett] said there may be more. They found the rougher photos, and for me, that’s where the rubber meets the road because they’re unpolished, their guard’s down, they’re not posing".[12]
Partial bibliography
2009 - 44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World
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