Home > Culture > Mentor Showcase > Burt Glinn — globetrotting news photographer
ASMP Life Member Burt Glinn:
From the Crimson to Cuba to the Four Corners of the Globe…
The allure of the globetrotting photographer is nowhere better exemplified than in the work of Burt Glinn, a past president of the ASMP and a long-time member of Magnum Photos for which he also served multiple terms as president.
As a photographer, Glinn has a nose for news (he once fled a tony Manhattan New Year’s Eve party for a late-night flight to Havana and a chance to follow the Cuban revolution) and an eye for unfolding events (arriving late at the scene, Glinn scooped hundreds of other photographers when he found himself standing directly behind Khrushchev paused before the Lincoln Memorial during his historic US visit). These valuable skills were formed by Glinn’s early years as a Harvard Crimson editor and a LIFE magazine photographers’ assistant.
“I’ve worked with most of the major publications in the world, but I still think that the Crimson was the best,” Glinn told us during an extensive interview. An image portfolio with select career highlights was published in the ASMP Bulletin Winter 2007 issue. What follows below is the full transcript of our interview conducted by phone on January 10, 2007.
—Jill Waterman, Editor
JW: Please tell us about your beginnings in photography.
BG: It wasn’t the way most people do it, I guess. When I was a kid, an aunt gave me a pretty good camera as a birthday present. It was a Kodak Monitor folding camera with 620-sized film, and you had to understand about f-stops and shutter speeds to make it work. The instruction sheets in the film box said that if it was sunny, you shot this way. You also had sunny bright and sunny dull, and that seemed to me to be very incomplete. I was a kind of library nerd, so I started to read the beginning photography books at the library, including one put out by Kodak.
THE LIBRARY
I was in Pittsburgh, and I started going to the Carnegie library. I got into a little problem with the librarian because a lot of the books I wanted to see were traditional photo books from the late 40’s and included a lot of nude pictures. The librarian didn’t understand why a 13-year-old boy wanted those kinds of books. My mother put on her battle gear and went down and had a fight with the library. She said, “He knows what it’s all about, so he can see the books.”
DISCOVERING COLOR
Once I started getting into photography, the deeper I got, the deeper I had to go. One of the most influential books was by an advertising photographer named Paul Outerbridge. At that time, Kodachrome wasn’t well accepted, but if you wanted to understand color, you had to read Outerbridge’s book because he was a genius about color. He explained how they printed color with dye transfer, which was a fairly complicated process that is rarely used anymore. Dye transfers require special equipment and paper, and now that Kodak has stopped making it, you have to produce the paper yourself. There’s an Indian guy in Hamburg who still does dye transfer printing, but you have to fly over there and supervise it. The Outerbridge book explains the principles of color separation, and it got me very deep into trying to understand photography.
There was also a series of books called the Encyclopedia of Photography. There were about 50 books in the series and they arrived one at a time. I can remember waiting in Pittsburgh for the next issue all the time, so this kept up my interest.
POLITICS
My parents were politically active, and I was politically active. I was and still am a Democrat. I got interested in the newspaper business because of political activity and not so much because of photography.
There was a local magazine in Pittsburgh called the Bulletin Index, and I did a couple beginner things for them. By the time I got to Harvard, I was doing a lot of advanced amateur work, but the main thing I got into, newspaper work, was because of the Harvard Crimson. That led to a lot of other things.
HARVARD
I went to Harvard in February of 1943 because the war was on, and they were taking mid-term applications. I thought it was a mistake that they took me. I was a little surprised to get in. The next semester I got drafted into the army. When I returned three years later, I went back to Harvard and by that time I had decided I wanted to be a newspaperman.
CONTAFLEX
I liked photography and had been exposed to all sorts of exotic new cameras in Germany. I just got things. I don’t even understand how I got them. There was one very exotic camera called a Contaflex, which was a twin lens version of a 35mm Contax camera. It wasn’t automatic, but it was the first camera with a built-in exposure meter. I’m sure if I’d held on to that, it would be a really expensive museum piece, but I’ve never held onto anything in my life.
When I went back to Harvard and wanted to get onto the newspaper, I went around to see the Crimson. There was a lot of fervor there because it was just after the war and a lot of the editors were coming back from Army experience. They were pretty advanced in their knowledge of journalism. I had some friends on the newspaper, and they knew I was interested in photography. By that time I had a 4x5 Speed Graphic — I shudder when I think of it now. Carrying that around with a Jacobson flashgun! To get on the Crimson was very hard. They had competitions, and they told me, “It’s easier to get on it if you want to be a photographer.” There were a lot of people who were very good at writing, but there weren’t very many photographic candidates at that time, so I started that way.
THE CRIMSON
The Harvard Crimson is run by an editorial board of six. I was one of the six editors and the photographic chairman. I did a lot of other things for them too. I’m still active in the Crimson and am a judge for their photographic competition.
I have two or three formative experiences in my whole career, and I think being a member of the Harvard Crimson was the first and probably the most important. A lot of the people on the Crimson with me went on to become very superior journalists and Pulitzer Prize winners. We have all stayed friends, and this has always been a good contact for me.
I still think back to the Crimson, and although I’ve worked with most of the major publications in the world now, I still think that the Crimson was the best.
I remember in 1948, when I was a senior at Harvard; we got a letter from President Truman thanking the Crimson for their editorial support. He said we were the only major paper besides the New York Times that supported him.
THE LIFE ASSISTANT
When I got out of school, by some really strange set of circumstances, I was hired by LIFE Magazine. I was going to be an assistant for everybody on the staff. When anybody wanted an assistant, they would send me out from New York. That was a big formative experience because, as it turned out, I worked as an assistant for Alfred Eisenstadt, Cornell Capa, and a lot of other big LIFE shooters. My relationship with Cornell opened up a relationship with his brother Bob, and that opened up the possibility of getting into Magnum when it wasn’t so arcane.
MAGNUM
People ask me how to get into Magnum today, and I roll my eyes and say, “You wouldn’t believe it.” It’s a complicated process. But in 1949, which is when I met Bob Capa, if he said your photography was kind of interesting, that was probably the key to getting in. Now it’s very Byzantine. It’s like getting into Skull and Bones. Back then it was simple.
As the assistant for LIFE magazine, I had to learn all about strobe lighting, artificial lighting and everything like that. I was mostly assisting the photographers by carrying these huge strobe lights and power packs. They weighed about 40 pounds a pack, and you connected them in series. You usually had to carry them in a station wagon. I remember driving to Washington and setting up those lights in an armory. Because of that I got to be very good friends with Gjon Mili. People don’t know who Gjon Mili is today, but Gjon was really a great photographer and a marvelous man. I think I learned more from Mili and the LIFE photographers for whom I carried bags than I did from anybody else in my life. I never took a course in photography. I just absorbed it through osmosis, I guess, working with these guys.
JOE LEIBLING
At the Crimson there was a real serious aesthetic about how to practice journalism, and one of the people I met through that was a writer for the New Yorker named A. J. Leibling. Joe Leibling wrote a marvelous series of articles called the Wayward Press. He was a critic of most of the journalism of that time and a critic of the publishers. If you talk to anybody who was around journalism from 1950 on, Joe Leibling was a very major source, and he was very stringent about the importance of good journalism. Joe came up to speak to the Crimson, and we got to be friends. I remember running across Joe while working on stories later in my career. We weren’t doing the same story, but were in the same place. He was a marvelous, funny guy, and he knew an enormous amount about food, where to eat, and what to do. He wasn’t at all the dashing young war correspondent. He was sort of pudgy, and he talked very slowly, but he was a great journalist. Anybody who was a journalist in the mid-50’s was greatly influenced by Joe, and he was a friend and a great influence on me.
INFLUENCES
When I was at the Crimson, I ran around with a big Speed Graphic. I go back up there to visit now and then and I think, “Boy, were we primitive.” I’d go out and do a picture, go back to develop it in the darkroom, and make a work print. I’d take that downtown, have a lithograph made, and then have a cut made of it so that we could get it in the paper. We’d have to get that done by 2 AM. It was a big experience, and I still have very close friends from those days.
I remember when we were in Saigon during the Vietnam War, and I was working for the Saturday Evening Post with the writer Stanley Karnow. He was a classmate from Harvard who had also been on the Crimson and had won a Pulitzer Prize. We got news that Tony Lewis, who had been the managing editor of the Crimson, had just won his second Pulitzer. So we sent him a telegram saying, “One Pulitzer Prize is admirable, but winning two is excessive.” Tony is a great friend of mine and through these kinds of connections everything seemed to fit together.
THE ASMP
When they started the ASMP, I don’t even remember what year it was, but in 1948 there weren’t a lot of members, I’ll tell you that. That’s when I came to join. It was largely because I believed that you couldn’t get anywhere unless you had a union of some sort. You couldn’t have a union in photography because of the laws, but they did start the ASMP. I was there with a lot of the people who started it. I was very young then and not terribly involved, but I met people like Jay Maisel and Larry Fried by going to meetings. Eventually, largely because there was no alternative, we became officers of the ASMP. There weren’t many other people around.
I was President in the ‘60’s. Larry Fried had gotten me interested. I went to the meetings. I was involved in all these movements to protect photographers’ rights. It fit well with Magnum because Magnum was in the forefront of the battle to not give up rights to the photograph. Most of us in Magnum, and a couple of people outside of Magnum, were very stalwart in that battle and refused to sign a work for hire contract. That was pretty important at that time because there weren’t too many jobs you could get where publishers didn’t want to have the rights to the photographs.
PHOTOGRAPHERS RIGHTS
I think that was the most important thing I did with the ASMP. The ASMP really established those kinds of efforts in me and our battles for owning the rights. I’m now 81 years old, and I’m sitting here in a 600 square foot office / studio that we built out here. I am surrounded by thousands and thousands of transparencies that are categorized by story number and subject and everything. This all came out of the insistence on owning our own material. The only stories I regret are the stories that somehow, for some reason, I wasn’t very firm about getting the stuff back. When I was in my 30’s, it somehow didn’t seem as important as it does now. Yet I now live off the proceeds of selling subsidiary rights.
We’ll be going into town next week for a memorial service for Leonard Freed who was a terrific Magnum photographer. I think of him when we go through the number of past Magnum photographers whose work is still known because Magnum kept the image rights in the photographer’s name. We still get exhibits for them, and the images are still circulated and published only because we fought for those rights. Everyone in Magnum has always filled an obligation to our history because of the founders. I’m sitting tomorrow to edit David Seymour’s work for a Magnum sixtieth anniversary book. All the Magnum photographers are going to have about 6 or 8 pages. It’s going to be a hell of a book.
GJON MILI
I always think of Gjon Mili because he was such a close friend of ours and a marvelous, interesting man. When I speak to young photographers, they don’t know who he was. At the end of his life, he had some health problems, as we all do, and LIFE magazine very generously helped take care of him. He left all his stuff to a nephew. He left instructions that Time-Life should handle his files, but he didn’t have a lot left because there had been a fire in his studio. Time-Life is a corporation, and the people working there now have no sense of obligation to Gjon Mili, whereas all of us in Magnum do. It’s just very hard to get enough enthusiasm up to work on his files and work on exhibits and books for him. The dead photographers from Magnum still have very active files because a lot of us live on the strength and the memory of working with these guys, and everybody has somebody who they decide to take care of. Werner Bishof, for instance, has his son who attends all the Magnum meetings and gets all our mailings. Bob Capa, of course, is a very, very active file. He is a celebrity still in Japan, and if you have a Bob Capa exhibit, it’s a huge exhibit wherever it is in the world. Most of us have worked now to have the rights belong to our heirs, but I have written instructions to have Magnum handle all the rights, as long as they remain Magnum. That really works to everybody’s benefit.
MAGNUM PRESIDENCY
I spent three terms as president of Magnum, but I don’t think this was sequentially. It wasn’t by choice, not by my choice anyhow. I remember Elliott Erwitt was president a couple of times. According to him, when somebody asked him to be president of Magnum, he said, “It’s like getting cancer. You’ve got to adjudicate all these arguments between your friends.” When I was president of Magnum the most productive period was when we put out the book called In Our Time, which is a hugely successful photo book. A lot of students of photography keep in touch with us because of that book. When we put that out, it was very important for somebody to ride shotgun on the whole thing. I was very much involved and flew from New York to Paris four or five times. We asked Bob Delpire, the great French editor, to edit the book, and I had to take the time out to see that everything got done. You know, you have to be careful when you do a Magnum project. You’re not an editor, you’ve gotta be a referee to see that everybody is treated fairly.
DINNER WITH CARTIER BRESSON
The most important thing for me and the ASMP were the rights issues. I haven’t been active recently, but there are people now who are very cognizant of the rights issues. I don’t even think I have to pay attention because they’re not going to give them up. I feel that those issues are secure although they’re under attack all the time. I used to go to sessions with publishers to represent the ASMP point of view. It was very difficult because the publishers would send the art directors to argue their case, and we were mostly friends with them. The art directors were working for big companies and they represented their interests. I represented the photographers’ case. I remember going to a negotiating meeting with the people from LIFE where they were represented by a lawyer and someone from the publishing house. We had these long discussions, and you had to try to keep them civil because your ass was on the line, too. You sometimes felt that the possibility of your future assignments was in jeopardy. Some people did suffer more than others. I was able to survive it because I had Magnum, which had widespread contacts in all parts of the publishing world, and because I also had other people to stand with me. When I came back from the meeting I was talking about, we were in New York and Cartier Bresson was here too. Whenever there were a couple of Magnum people in the same town at the same time, we’d have dinner. I guess Cornell Capa asked me to attend. Cornell was really very strong on this, and he was the one with the most at stake because he was a LIFE staff member. That was very tough for him, but he was a stalwart. So we came to this dinner, and people asked me how the meeting went. I told them that we met with these accountants and lawyers who said, “But you wouldn’t get to these places on your own. It’s our money that sends you there.” And I looked at Henri, who could get very indignant for a Frenchman, and he said, “Yes, it’s their money, but it is the skin off of our eyeballs.”
COPYRIGHT
My career has all been of a piece. I’ve never had a conflict. Things didn’t go so smoothly for a while with my assignments from LIFE being cut down a lot, but I was able to stand up to them. We also had some magazines where the editors were more civil. The magazines that weren’t difficult on the rights issues probably didn’t see very far ahead about how important it would be today with digital work going over the internet and everything. We were able to work for Holiday magazine, a major client of mine, and the editors were more civilized. Curtis Publishing was not the powerhouse that Time Inc. was at that time, so we were able to prevail on most of those assignments. As I say, you wouldn’t believe this studio. I have hundreds of file cases with 35 mm transparencies. I’m not very well now so I can’t work a lot, but I can spend days at a time here re-editing stories and finding images I didn’t remember I had. So, I would say, the idea of photographers’ rights fit very well into the whole jigsaw puzzle that was my career.
The ASMP was an important part of that, the people from the Crimson were important parts of that, and Magnum was an important part of that. It makes me very much at peace with myself because I didn’t have any of this internal friction about whether I should take this assignment or not. I would turn down the ones where I didn’t have the rights. By the early 50’s I was already adamant about this. Some of them I had the rights to, but I never organized myself enough to get back the negatives. I have a book with all the story lists I’ve done, and every time I have regrets it’s when I realize I had done something from which I don’t have the images.
I remember doing a wonderful story on the Columbia River Valley for the Lamp, the Esso Gas Company magazine. It was an industrial assignment. Because I was living in Seattle at that time, I didn’t get the film back, and I don’t know where it is now.
SEATTLE
I originally went to the West coast because of my job as assistant to all the LIFE photographers. I was on the payroll and was really part of LIFE magazine at that time. It was the only job I’ve ever had. After about a year and a half I realized that I was in New York, and I wasn’t taking many pictures for myself. Then they did something that, to me, is a telling mark of the kind of people some photographers are. They said, if I was going to be an assistant to the LIFE photographers, I could not shoot pictures for LIFE.
I know some very famous photographers who insisted that their assistants couldn’t take their cameras with them on assignment. But when I was traveling the world and could take an assistant, one of the great advantages they had in working for me was that they could take their cameras. I was always delighted to see them bring their gear.
When LIFE said I couldn’t take pictures as long as I was on their payroll as an assistant, they didn’t believe I’d quit, but I did. I quit the next day. By that time I’d been there a year, and I knew a lot of people. Another fellow who was a classmate of mine from Harvard was a young reporter just starting out as a bureau chief in LIFE’s Seattle bureau. He didn’t have any photographers out there, so he said, “Why don’t you come out and maybe we can do some things together?” So I went out to Seattle. I actually had office space there. It was like I was a staff photographer for LIFE. They never were really major assignments, but they were good ones, and I was able to build a reputation out there. It was very good.
TURNING POINT
After Bob Capa was killed, we had a memorial service back in New York. I came back for that. I was having drinks with David Seymour, “Chim,” who became president of Magnum after Bob died. Chim was like a rabbi to me. He was always giving me advice and everything. Chim looked at me and said, “You’ve gotta decide: either you’re going to be the kind of photographer where some editor says, ‘We have a story in Idaho, and Glinn lives in Seattle, so get him,’ or you want to be the kind of photographer where an editor says ‘We have a story in Timbuktu, and I don’t care where Glinn is, get him for it.’” That was a convincing argument for me.
After I had that conversation with Chim, he thought I should move to Paris. Both Capa and Werner Bishof died on the same weekend, and they didn’t have many photographers in Paris who were doing the kind of journalism they were. Not that I was comparable to them, but I could do the kinds of journalism that they did. So I was going to go back to New York and get established and then go to Paris and make Paris my headquarters. So I had gone out to Seattle in 1952, and Bob and Werner died in 1954. The memorial service was in 1955, and I started coming back to New York in 1956.
ISRAEL
Chim had gotten me an assignment to work for El Al to do a job for them because they had the first fan-jet airplanes. This was before the 707. I did the El Al job, and I was editing it in New York. I was still living in a hotel here because I hadn’t really gotten moved out of Seattle. At the hotel I heard on the radio that the Israelis and the British and the French had attacked the Egyptians across the Suez Canal. So I said, “Well, I should get there,” I knew the people at El Al because I had worked for the Public Relations department, so I called a man named Peter Brunswick. He got me a seat. He said, “Everybody is flying back to Israel today,” but he got me the last seat on an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv. I got that seat the night that the war broke out, and it was impossible to get another seat. There weren’t very many available. That day I went to the Magnum office, and John Morris, our editor, said, “Let’s call LIFE.” He called them and said, “Glinn got the last seat to Tel Aviv.” LIFE thought this would not be too good for them because they wanted to send one of their own photographers. There were problems about insurance and everything, but finally after a day of negotiating and learning that they couldn’t get a seat, they put me temporarily on the staff. I don’t think I ever appeared on the masthead or anything, but I was on salary, and I went and covered the Sinai War.
It was a very short war, but it’s very funny because when I went out on that flight from New York, LIFE was able to get a seat for Milton Orchevesky who was working in their Paris office, and he was going to be the reporter on the story. He was under the impression that they had asked me to come but that I had tickets to My Fair Lady and couldn’t go. This was not true, but that’s how all myths in photography start.
I did cover the Six Day War with Milton, and I had to stay in Israel for about 10 weeks because of the contract we had. Nobody knew it was going to be a short war. They had signed me up for something like 10 or 12 weeks, and they had to find things for me to do. So I shot some other stories in Israel for them. When I got back to New York, I was already involved in all kinds of international things, so I didn’t go to Paris. I guess it would have been better for me if I had. I stayed in New York and some friends of mine had become editors of other magazines. Clay Felker and I had an apartment together. He ended up as editor of Esquire and then founded New York magazine, so I was in the middle of a lot of things. I stayed in New York and worked out of here at that time. In those days I remember that the ASMP took up a lot of my time.
BALANCING ACTS
JW: How did you balance all these things with your travel schedule?
BG: I lied a lot. No, it wasn’t as demanding as it would be now. It was the beginning of the time when the ASMP really started to expand. We started to get new chapters. and we started to have new kinds of problems. They didn’t have e-mail, but they had the telephone in those days so we could do some things. Also, there were a group of us who were pretty adamant about photographers’ rights, and you could count on them to carry the ball for you. Jay Maisel was very strong and Larry Fried, who was the first of us to be president, was very strong on that, too. I remember doing a story and having to write something for the ASMP and staying up all night in a hotel in Las Vegas. I had thought through a long letter that I had to write for the ASMP about an argument on photographer’s rights. I was in a ballroom there taking pictures of brand new cars and thinking of all the arguments I could for this treatise. I probably wasn’t the most vigilant person of the ASMP. I probably could have been impeached for the small amount of time I paid it, but I did spend a lot of time on the photographers’ rights thing. At that time it was a real New York-centric organization, and I didn’t think that was a good idea. Larry Fried did a lot to expand things. We met other photographers and talked to them about joining up and starting other chapters.
JW: So, in a way, maybe your traveling around was an advantage?
BG: Yeah, it always helped. When you get letters or mailings from the ASMP and you say, “Oh I know that guy, he was out here,” and you have a personal connection, it’s pretty good.
FAVORITE PICTURES
JW: So going back to your pictures and looking back at your whole career, do you have any one favorite picture or assignment?
BG: Oh, I really don’t think of pictures that way. After the Sinai War I was fairly active in trying to hold the line against LIFE for the photographers’ rights issues. I kind of liked to be in competition with LIFE magazine. Magnum would decide to do a story that was an international story, the kind of thing that LIFE was always doing. What we would do was get guarantees from all kinds of magazines, from Paris Match and from Picture Post in London, and they would pay a couple thousand dollars to get the rights to the first look at the take in their country. We always tried to get LIFE to buy this, but LIFE always said, “We have our own coverage, and we have all these people with motorcycles and messengers, and we’ve got this whole mechanism in place for getting our stuff in, so I don’t think we’ll need it.”
The picture I had the most fun with was when Khrushchev visited the United States and I was in charge of the Magnum coverage. We had a good group of photographers, but we didn’t have any of the organization like what LIFE had. We couldn’t go and hire an airplane to fly us around. I think it was a very small amount we wanted to give LIFE the first-look rights in America, but they said they didn’t need it.
KHRUSCHCHEV
When Khrushchev came, the first stop was in Washington, DC, and I remember being there. LIFE had all kinds of photographers there, much better and more important than I was, but I remember running across Carl Mydans. He said, “This is a job for an old man like me.” We were running to get the same story, the same picture. I was very tired at the end of the day in Washington, and one of the last stops was the Lincoln Memorial. I was really too tired to run very fast, so I came straggling up at the end of the line of people trying to get in. All the major magazines like LIFE could have somebody cover just the Lincoln Memorial and have other photographers somewhere else, but we had to try and do everything. So I came struggling up, and I realized I was going to be late to get the picture. I kept going, and I looked up, and there I was standing directly in back of Khrushchev. He was looking directly at Lincoln’s statue. I knew I had a pretty good picture. The next day we flew from Washington to New York, and the film was processed there.
That day, before I left for Los Angeles with Khrushchev, Lee Jones, who was the editor of Magnum, showed me the picture I got of Lincoln’s statue with the back of Khrushchev’s head. When I arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in LA (the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was shot), there was a message for me to call my office. I called, and Lee said, “LIFE wants to buy your picture of Khrushchev and the Lincoln Memorial.” I said, “That’s terrific, I hope that they’re going to pay well for it.” She said that she asked for more than they could have paid for the whole story before, and that they were going to run it as a double page. I said, “But, it’s a vertical picture,” and she said, “Yeah, they’re going to turn the magazine on its side.” I consider that picture a personal triumph. It was the kind of picture a journalist always hopes he’s going to be able to get. You’re only going to get it through luck. I like that.
PICTURE STORIES
The other things I liked a lot were the stories I did for Holiday magazine. I did whole issues for them. I used to do forty- and fifty-page stories. I guess National Geographic did this, but that is a small-sized magazine, and Holiday was a full sized magazine like LIFE was. I did special issues on Russia, Japan, Mexico, and one on the Islands of the South Pacific. Some of them turned out to be good books too. They were originally Holiday magazine assignments, but I owned all the rights. The writer was Laurens Van der Post, who’s a very distinguished author. When he told his English publisher that he’d like to do a book, they got together with me and did A View of All the Russias and A Portrait of Japan.
JW: What was your most challenging assignment?
BG: I guess they’re all challenging in different ways. The Khrushchev coverage was really challenging because I was sort of responsible for keeping the Magnum people up to date. Since I knew a lot of the people from the State Department at that time, I had to winkle press passes for Magnum.
JW: So you were doing two jobs there.
BG: Yeah. Well, I considered it all one job. I wasn’t really responsible, but I was the one it kind of fell to because there were Magnum photographers who joined the coverage at different times. There were two other photographers who covered everything, but it happened that I knew the guys handing out credentials from the State Department. This was the first gang-bang story everybody had to get, and there were hundreds of photographers from hundreds of magazines. The poor State Department people, they were overwhelmed because nobody thought it would be that kind of coverage. I knew them well enough to be able to lie to them without blinking an eye. They said, “Well, we got four positions here, and we’re going to give one to Time Inc. and one to the AP.” I said, “But you haven’t got the foreign magazines covered. Magnum is covering it for Paris Match and the Picture Post …,” and I went through all the magazines that we had contracts with. These magazines also had their own photographers there, but I talked the State Department people into giving us credentials for foreign press. It was a very colorful eight or nine days when Khrushchev was here.
So that was one of them. The other most challenging story was the Cuban Revolution.
NEW YEAR’S EVE 1958
I was at a New Year’s Eve party, December 31, 1958, at Nicholas Bellegi’s house. He was working for the New York Times at that time. People started calling from the Times saying they’d be late because the story had broken that Battista had fled Cuba and they had to stay and put it to bed. I looked around and said, “I guess I should go there.” So there I was in a tuxedo, and I had gone with Clay Felker, my roommate at the time. I went up to him and borrowed whatever money I could from him and from whomever else was at the party. Then I went to my apartment because I didn’t think a dinner jacket was proper attire for a war. I changed clothes and went to the airport. There was a flight called the Yellowbird that went to Miami late at night. It was the precursor of a shuttle, so I got on that flight and flew to Miami.
It was challenging because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I got to Miami. It was well after New Year’s Eve at that point, and the airport was practically empty. There was this counter that ran taxi flights to Cuba in those days. If you’ve seen Guys and Dolls, you’ll realize that people used to fly to Cuba to go to dinner in Havana. I picked up the phone on one of those counters, and I talked the guy into flying me to Havana. He was annoyed because it was late at night, and he said, “Well, you’ll be the first one.” I said, “Well, I don’t think so because there is a revolution coming to a close there, and there’ll be all kinds of high paying people wanting to charter your plane. All I want is one seat on it.” He said, “Don’t worry. It’s first come, first served, and you’ve got the first seat.”
CASTRO AND CUBA
So there I had been in New York at midnight, and at seven AM the next morning I was landing in Havana not knowing what the hell I was going to do and with no contacts. I had been there once before, and I knew where most of the journalists hung out. I checked into that hotel, and then I thought I’d get some rest and go find out what was happening. There was a lot of shooting in the street, so I said, “I guess I ought to go there.” I went down to the street, and everybody was shooting at everybody else, and nobody knew what was happening. I got a lot of pictures of the street fighting. There was nobody in charge. The Battista people had left and the Castro people hadn’t arrived.
I finally found a police station where a lot of the secret police were under arrest. I was talking to the man in charge there, and he said that Castro wasn’t in Havana but that he was coming. We looked at a map and decided where he would have to go through to get to Havana. He wasn’t going to fly. I got together with Jerry Hanafin, from the Miami bureau of Time. I knew him through Cornell. He was a good friend of Cornell’s. We sort of pooled all our resources. He had the money, and I had the idea of knowing where we were going to go. We hired a cab to take us to Santa Clara, about a three-hour drive from Havana. We waited there and found the parade coming into town. Castro was in it, so we stuck with him day and night until he arrived in Havana. It was about five or six days on the road. That was a place where I had to make a lot of decisions, too, because Jerry was working for Time magazine. There was also a photographer named Andy St. George, who was a crazy Hungarian who had been with Castro for a long time. He was on assignment from LIFE. They got word that LIFE wanted a cover shot, and they had to do it the next day in color. I got the word to Andy St. George, but I stayed taking pictures in black and white because I thought it was a black and white story. It was a good idea because that story is kind of a classic. It justified my faith in the kinds of mistakes I make that are useful.
A good decision would have been to take the color film to the airport and get it to LIFE in time for the cover, but I was doing this story that I thought was a good black and white story, so I stayed with it, and I didn’t worry about getting it to the airport and up to New York. Andy Saint George got the cover, but I got a picture that’s in a lot of people’s collections now, and I think that it was a good decision to make.
ADVERTISING WORK
JW: I’m curious about some of your advertising work. There are a series of tearsheets of an ad campaign you did for VO liquor in the ASMP files. Is there any special significance to why these tearsheets were saved?
BG: That must have been from the mid-1950’s. Old Mr. Seagrams, the father, had this idea that he wanted to make 7 Crown whiskey as prestigious as scotch. They looked at portfolios, and they saw some of the things I did for Holiday. They came to me and asked me to do a couple of these because they didn’t know where to start. You know, advertising wasn’t as hip then as it is now. I’m trying to think of which was the first one I did for them, because I did a lot of them. There was a wonderful guy named Les Silvers who was the art director. They wanted to do these ads in places that smacked of wealth and everything like that, and they wanted me to come up with some ideas. I don’t know what they figured I would know about rich places, but I said, “I gather you don’t want a bar mitzvah.”
So I would come up with some suggestions. I think it was in 1959 and 1960 that we did these. I had been doing Holiday stories in different places, and I had some connections. There were kind of rich ladies who helped set up pictures for people. They were sort of social people. If the client had known what they were looking for, they would have gone to Slim Aarons, but I wasn’t gonna tell them that.
SEAGRAMS
JW: So was this one of your early advertising campaigns?
BG: It was comparatively early, but I didn’t do a lot of advertising. The reason I can place it in time is that I remember I did one in Madrid with a very elegant lady who worked for me on a story in Barcelona. She got me introductions to the countess of this and the countess of that, etc. I was always surprised that, if you could pay them, you could get people to provide their homes and things. They would let you shoot the picture in their palazzo. I was surprised, but we got a lot of them. We did the one in Spain on election night in 1960. I was really very tired because I had stayed up all night at the American Embassy to see whether Kennedy or Nixon was going to win. That whole thing was a very kind of hand-to-mouth kind of thing. We got rights for some places that were very elegant settings because I would know somebody, who knew somebody, who knew somebody who needed money.
Once I found the location and got the rights to do it, we had to cast it and decide what kind of party it would be. Sometimes the art director had the best idea, and sometimes I did. We tried to avoid the most cliché-ridden things. I remember when we were shooting the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome; the art director had the idea that we ought to shoot the butler and the maid cleaning up after the party with empty bottles and a mop and everything. Once we had an idea, we would try different things when we got there. We figured that since we got the right to shoot there, we ought to do a couple of situations to get the idea right.
The one we did in San Francisco was in Melvin Belli’s office. He was a big fancy lawyer with a big fancy office.
I don’t remember exactly how Walt Disney was associated, but we did one with a croquet party on the lawn of Betsy Bloomingburg, who was a big social name in Los Angeles. As we went through these different story ideas that I did for Holiday, I didn’t know any fancy people, but the editors of Holiday knew some people, and I used to use them. It was challenging.
WHO’S BEHIND THE FOSTER GRANTS?
I had the most fun with an advertising campaign for Foster Grant sunglasses. The punch line was “Isn’t that Woody Allen behind those Foster Grants.” We had to spot six funny lines that Woody Allen would say in different characters. We did them with Woody Allen, Claudia Cardinale, Anthony Quinn, and Anita Ekberg. It was all very strange and very funny. We would fly to meet these people and the copy writer, the ad man, was a very, very funny guy, named Ray Brown. He would think up these different ideas for punch lines, and then we would rummage through somebody’s closet and find out if he had the right clothes. For the one we did with Anthony Quinn, we had ten or twelve different sunglasses so he could pick the sunglasses that would add to his character, which looked like a South American dictator with a Panama hat and sunglasses. We had more fun thinking up the lines than we had taking the pictures. The campaign ran for a couple of years. It was the punch line, and different people would say, “Isn’t that so and so behind the Foster Grants?”
REAL LIFE
In all the different types of work I’ve done — editorial, travel, advertising — they’ve all had the same engine driving them, which is that I can’t think of anything that’s better than what happens in real life. Even when I did those Seagram’s ads, I tried to think up a situation that doesn’t look posed like so many liquor ads do now.
I remember we did another campaign for Seagram’s for all of the kinds of drinks they made. We had to think of a situation for each drink that would be a real situation. We needed an idea for Seagram’s 7 Crown. That’s their big popular, not fancy, liquor. We were in Providence, and there was a dog show going on there. A lady who worked for me there knew all these people, so we set up a picnic in the back of a truck. We had the dog breeder and one of the handlers and several puppies. They were all on the back of the truck with the whole picnic of different cold cuts and cheeses like a European picnic. When we started, it looked like it was going to be rather stiff. We were worried about people not getting into it and looking like they were posing for pictures. We eventually poured the drinks and had them have a few. Then the little puppies came out, and the people got involved with them. That was really a very good campaign. It wasn’t even an ad. It was an annual report. The Seagram’s Annual Reports were very good.
JW: How did you create situations to keep people loose and natural?
BG: I had to do annual reports for Time Warner. I did three or four of them. They had different divisions, and one of these handled the licensing rights for the dog they own the rights to. Every time they’d done it before, it was in a toy store. I thought it would be better if we could do it with kids. We had a hard time getting this done because there were kids in it, but it wasn’t an ad. It was an annual report, so we didn’t have to worry about advertising restrictions. There was this wonderful lady named Karen Vaughn who lived near Providence, in Little Compton, RI, and she knew everybody in town. We just had her throw a Halloween party, a real Halloween party, for all the kids. We got costumes from Time Warner, and they all came to the Halloween party, and we made it a real party. We didn’t say to the kids, “You go there and you go there.” We had them ducking for apples and doing everything. Everybody got involved in the party. We were able to get a lot of candid pictures of kids in costume, but you wouldn’t think that this was a set up if you saw the pictures. That’s what I like to do. I don’t think my imagination is as good as god’s. I think the way things happen when they really happen is better. You have them working for you instead of you working for them.
THE EDITORIAL APPROACH
JW: It’s like the editorial approach to advertising.
BG: Well, I came to advertising through editorial work. I do everything with that in mind to create a situation that’s as real as possible. The one thing you can’t do in journalism is to create any situations. You’ve got to do the real thing. To do this in advertising was unique for that time. We had a little run on it and then we went to other things, or they went to other things. I didn’t go to other things.
JW: I want to end by asking you about your view of the field of photography today. Are there any particular attributes that you think are most important?
BG: You’ve ‘gotta have a kind of pure soul with all this digital stuff and Photoshop. Photoshop is the antithesis of journalism. What is important in journalism is to see what is really happening.
PHOTOSHOP
I don’t know, but the Khrushchev picture I described to you… If somebody who knew a lot of photographs and who knew me as a photographer looked at it, they wouldn’t say, “Oh, he could have really done this all in Photoshop.” It looks like two images. It’s just the back of Khrushchev’s head and it’s the Lincoln Memorial. You could do it in one swipe of Photoshop. Yet if they knew my work, they would know that I would never do anything like that. That was anathema to me.
The wonderful thing [about digital] is to be able to take advantage of the good things that digitalization can do. You don’t have to worry about running to the airport so as to get your film on an airplane to get it back to New York in time. That’s all wonderful. But you gotta be careful of the seduction of digital — the idea that you can make a picture better by changing it. You just can’t make anything better by changing it. It’s more important to be true.
In journalism you don’t set it up. You think about where it’s all going to be, and sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you get to places you can be. I didn’t set up pictures, even some of the great Holiday pictures that I’ve done. I try and do it so you don’t get this stiff feeling that it’s been arranged.
I do two things. For ads and commercial work, I try to create a situation in which people can react in real ways. For journalism, I don’t touch a thing, I don’t tell anybody to go there and sit there or move there or do anything. I’m really devoted to the idea that this is too important to screw around with.
THE FUTURE
JW: Do you have any upcoming plans for your work?
BG: No. I’m not taking pictures anymore. I may be working on a book, but I’ve got to be careful about saying that because I always say it, and I never do it.
The Magnum 60th Anniversary book will be coming out soon. Another photographer will pick seven or ten pictures of mine, and I’ll pick seven or ten of David Seymour’s. It’s that way. We’re going to have no control over our own shows. I think it’s a bad idea because you’ll create enemies for life, but go ahead and do it. Erich Lessing may be selecting mine. He’s a Viennese photographer and an old friend of mine, but we haven’t seen each other in a long time. They tell me he’s going to be selecting it, so I’m careful not to send him any e-mails or anything. I don’t want to influence him.
I’ll tell you, at this stage, being 81, and not too much dancing like Fred Astaire, it was a great, great thing for me to have lucked into the idea of photography as a career. I’m very grateful for that, and I’m very grateful to a lot of these people whose names I’ve mentioned who just contributed to creating a great life.
JW: Thanks for your time in speaking with us, Burt. You’ve had a phenomenal career with such range and breadth to your work. It’s really inspiring.
BG: I didn’t mean to inspire you or to awe you too much, but I hope you liked it.