In these snapshots, the omnipresent white light eclipses people in a visual exercise that reflects on the real dimension of the landscapes and architectures. The images shape a timeless space in an almost dream-like journey through time and light.

Swiss photographer Rene Burri (1933-2014) has been wherever history had been played out. A member of the famous Magnum Photos cooperative since 1955, he photographed in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, recording the Six-Days and Yom Kippur Wars, as well as the Vietnam War during the 1960s. His many travels took him to Japan and China, across Europe and the Americas to report sharply many of the 20th century's major events. His extraordinary sense for people and their personalities helped him create portraits of celebrities such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and Luis Barragan; or artists Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Tinguely. His iconic picture of Che Guevara with cigar, shot in 1963, is one of the world's most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits ever. Burri had a close relationship with Lausanne's Musee de l' Elysee and in 1987 the museum staged a first exhibition of his work, entitled The Ruins of the Future, followed by his first major retrospective in 2004. The museum also hosts the Fondation Rene Burri, which the artist established in 2013 as a home for his estate. Published to coincide with a new exhibition at Musee de l'Elysee in spring 2020, Rene Burri: An Eye Explosion draws from this vast collection. It brings together for the first time Burri's entire body of work, photographic and non-photographic. Black-and-white and colour photographs feature alongside previously unpublished archival documents as well as book designs, exhibition projects, travel diaries, collages, watercolours, and other multiple objects he collected. It offers a new, multi-faceted and uniquely intimate view of one of the world's greatest photo reporters.

Bernard Plossu, born in Vietnam in 1945, is one of today's best-known French photographers. His photos reflect locales he has visited all over the world: Senegal, Turkey, Poland, Mexico, Guatemala, and the American West. The photographs here were taken by Plossu in the late 1970s and are images of New Mexico--where the sun, the dust, the rain, the mud, the wind, the snow, the altitude (7,000 feet), and the smells forge a uniqueness.

"Bernard Plossu has given us a remarkable record of our own Southwest as seen through the eyes of a Frenchman. . . . The viewer knows what Plossu is saying by the immediate impact followed by slow release. There are no clichA(c)s here. His subtle images must be teased from the data he provides. It is our own Southwest but seen in a new light from another point of view. We can learn and enjoy from all three: the images, the photographer, and what they release in us. We also learn that our teacher--and all good photographers teach--is far from conventional."--from the Foreword