Iliyana Petrova's Reviews > Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past

This book is a mix of gorgeous photographs and a written conversation between Swiss photographer Rudy Burckhardt and poet Simon Pettet. The format is simple and can easily be a guarantee for a boring, pretentious little overpriced photography book. Yet Burckhardt’s art and approach to life feel like a treasure, and I’d say his photos and voice would resonate with anyone in touch with that “epiphanical beauty of an ordinary moment”, so present in his work.

For travelers, committed observers of city scapes and streets, for people who love life and its million daily visuals, whether in the lower east side, haiti, the british west indies, napoli, or old mykonos, this book is a love letter to it all.

It also kinda traces his life chronologically and thus contains a great deal of history. One page you’re in a psychiatric ward where Burckhardt and half of the men there are faking neurosis to get out of WW2 duty and getting shipped to Normany, the next page you’re in the 50’s - in Orson Welles’a appartment or Willem de Kooning’s studio, where a post-G.I. Bill America has brought the photographer at the center of American abstract expressionism.

Depth and simplicity are both present in this book and it’s the perfect mix between stimulating and relaxing.