David Burnett

David Burnett, Photographer
David Burnett was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. He began taking pictures on the yearbook at Olympus High School and while in high school, began freelancing – covering sports events and selling pictures to the S L Tribune. He launched his magazine career in 1967 as an intern at Time Magazine while earning a degree in political science at Colorado College. He went to Vietnam as a freelance photographer in 1970 working for Time and LIFE, and later joined Gamma (the French agency) before co-founding Contact Press Images in 1976. He has worked with all the Time Inc. magazines, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and National Geographic, in a career that has spanned nearly 45 years.

He has visited more than eighty countries, and covered stories as diverse as the French and American Presidential elections from 1972 to the present; the famine in Sahel in 1974 and in Ethiopia in 1984; the Iranian revolution following Ayatollah Khomeini’s return to Tehran in 1979, and the Summer Olympics from 1984 to 2012, and the Salt Lake Games of 2002. He has twice chaired the World Press Photo jury in Amsterdam, and a LUCIE past photojournalism award winner.