Balthasar Burkhard

Balthasar Burkhard (24 December 1944 – 16 April 2010) was a Swiss photographer who received international recognition for his large-format monochromatic photographic series.

Life Born in Bern in 1944, Burkhard was apprenticed to photographer Kurt Blum. After opening his studio in 1965, he was retained as documentation photographer by the Kunsthalle Bern, cooperating closely with curator Harald Szeemann and portraying many artists. This triggered Burkhard's interest in contemporary art. He came to international attention in 1969 through the exhibition of large-format photographs created together with the Bernese artist Markus Raetz, which included a 1:1 scale photograph of Raetz's study. Burkhard and Raetz were the first artists worldwide to expose photographs directly onto canvases using a self-developed technique.

After moving to the United States, Burkhard tried to find work as an actor in Hollywood, thinking that his distinctive face might make him suited for a career as a movie villain. From 1990 to 1992, Burkhard taught as a visiting lecturer at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, having moved to France in 1990. Towards the end of the 20th century, he began to focus on urban photography and directed the film Ciudad (film).

Work Burkhard, who almost always worked in black and white, was best known for his large-format photographic series. These images have been described as centering "on a stock of clearly defined subjects which he carefully extracts one by one from their context", as for instance with the photograph of an arm that filled an entire exhibition hall in the Kunsthalle Basel in 1983.

His work has been praised for its "hermeticism and poetic depth", and Gustave Courbet, whom Burkhard admired; his photographic reflections on the painter's work were made part of the great Courbet exposition of 2007 in the Grand Palais. His photographs have been published in several coffee-table books.