The Swiss photographer and filmmaker Rudolph Burckhardt (1914–99) came to New York City in 1935 and experienced the awe that many first-time visitors to the city share. The grandeur, the energy, the vitality, the sheer movement of this American metropolis all drew Burckhardt in, and he made New York his home for the rest of his life. Equally inflecting his career as a photographer and filmmaker, the city and its vibrant cultural life became Burckhardt's muse. Rudy Burckhardt—New York Moments is a rare collection of his photographs from the 1940s and 1950s. It includes not only street scenes and details of city life—“The tremendous difference in scale between the soaring buildings and the people in the street astonished me,” he wrote—but also the portraits he made of the New York School painters, most notably Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. As a photographer for ArtNews in the 1950s, Burckhardt had an insider’s view of the burgeoning art scene. But he also recognized the limits of photography—“a photograph, when it gets printed and comes out a picture, becomes like a fact, you know”—and turned his hand to filmmaking. For the rest of his career, photography and film would work together to capture his unique vision. Including photographs, film stills, and interpretive essays, Rudy Burckhardt accompanies an exhibition of Burckhardt's work at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland, and is a fitting tribute to the Swiss photographer who most poignantly captured the energy of mid-century New York.

Literary Nonfiction. Photography. CONVERSATIONS WITH RUDY BURCKHARDT comprises an extensive interview with poet Simon Pettet, including 22 photographs printed in duotone by the noted photographer, filmmaker and painter Rudy Burckhardt. The photographs, taken between 1938 and 1986, include his classic, much-admired image of the Flatiron Building, New York (1948) and photographs of rhapsodic beauty in Maine, gentle serenity in Naples and many humorous scenes (New York, Little Rock, Florence, Italy and others). His images are all completely accessible and reflect his resolutely unpretentious style. The sprightly dialogue complements the photographs, with many discussed individually. The publication of CONVERSATIONS WITH RUDY BURCKHARDT honored the occasion of three significant events that took place in 1987. After decades of relative obscurity, Rudy Burckhardt's devoted underground following was joined by many newfound admirers as a result of a major retrospective of 67 of his films at the Museum of Modern Art and, concurrently, an exhibition of photographs at Brooke Alexander Gallery and a show of paintings at Blue Mountain Gallery. As Phillip Lopate remarked, "In the book, one is privileged to hear the artist's thoughts and doubts about living, making art, beauty, time, youth, aging, public acclaim, compositional techniques, Switzerland, parents, and the non-relationship between rapture and sorrow...The combination of beautiful, rarely seen photographs and lively text make this an irresistible book."

Rudy Burckhardt emigrated from Basel to New York in 1935, hoping for a career in photography. By the 1940s he had begun to create a series of now-classic images of New York and he went on to become a leading artist in the city. This book examines Burckhardt's photographs.

«Ich musste weggehen, um aufzuwachen.» Rudy Burckhardt Als Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) aus der schweizerischen Enge 1935 nach New York entfloh, war er zuerst überwältigt «von der Grösse und der endlosen Energie dieser Stadt». Es dauerte dann auch zwei Jahre, bis er anfing, seine neue Lebenswelt zu fotografieren, die unauffälligen Aspekte des täglichen Lebens unmittelbar einzufangen. Dank seiner zurückhaltenden Art gelang ihm über sein ganzes Schaffen ein erstaunlich spielerischer Zugang zum Wesen des Alltäglichen. In Amerika wurde er durch New Yorker Strassenszenen, die heute zu den Ikonen der Fotografie des letzten Jahrhunderts zählen, berühmt. Schon früh lernte er viele zeitgenössische Künstler wie William de Kooning, Alex Katz und Jackson Pollock kennen und porträtierte sie in ihren Ateliers. Zudem war er auch als Experimental'lmer, Maler und Dozent tätig. In Europa war Rudy Burckhardts brillantes Werk lange Zeit unbekannt. In der Ausstellung des Kunstmuseums Basel wird eine Auswahl von Fotografien und Filmen zum ersten Mal in der Schweiz gezeigt.

In February 1940, Rudy Burckhardt spent an afternoon in Astoria, Queens, photographing the streets of the neighborhood, its gas stations, cars, children at play and other everyday scenes. Burckhardt later mounted a group of the photographs in a spiral-bound album, and wrote on the cover, in neatly printed letters, "An Afternoon in Astoria." This handmade book, unpublished until now, composes a tour of this part of New York, its empty lots and abandoned cars made poetic by Burckhardt's eye. The Museum of Modern Art recently published An Afternoon in Astoria and has also produced a limited-edition, boxed, spiral-bound facsimile of the original handmade album. An immaculately produced clothbound box with tipped-in reproductions from the book inside-and-out contains the album facsimile and a separately bound essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Associate Curator in the photography department of the Museum, discussing Burckhardt and specifically the groups of photographs he bound into albums for the pleasure of himself and his friends.

From the passenger seat of Sean Singer’s taxicab, we witness New York’s streets livid and languid with story and contemplation that give us awareness and aliveness with each trip across the asphalt and pavement. Laced within each fare is an illumination of humanity’s intimate music, of the poet’s inner journey—a signaling at each crossroad of our frailty and effervescence. This is a guidebook toward a soundscape of higher meaning, with the gridded Manhattan streets as a scoring field. Jump in the back and dig the silence between the notes that count the most in each unique moment this poet brings to the page. “Sean Singer’s radiant and challenging body of work involves, much like Whitman’s, nothing less than the ongoing interrogation of what a poem is. In this way his books are startlingly alive... I love in this work the sense that I am the grateful recipient of Singer’s jazzy curation as I move from page to page. Today in the Taxi is threaded through with quotes from Kafka, facts about jazz musicians, musings from various thinkers, from a Cathar fragment to Martin Buber to Arthur Eddington to an anonymous comedian. The taxi is at once a real taxi and the microcosm of a world—at times the speaker seems almost like Charon ferrying his passengers, as the nameless from all walks and stages of life step in and out his taxi. I am reminded of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn... Today in the Taxi is intricate, plain, suggestive, deeply respectful of the reader, and utterly absorbing. Like Honey and Smoke before it, which was one of the best poetry books of the last decade, this is work of the highest order.” —Laurie Sheck

Celebrating the unique duality of New York City - from its small neighbourhoods and intimate streets to its expansive open spaces and cloud-catching skyscrapers, this is a must-have volume for contemporary art lovers anywhere.