See Photographer Burk Uzzle’s Beautiful Chaos

2 minute read

“He’s conducted a visual love affair with America for years. Uzzle likes her funny face and doesn’t want her to change a hair for him. He sympathizes with her bad moods, her tragedies, her rather glaring imperfections, her obstreperous beauty, her unlikely aspirations. He is as fond of, and amused by, a bush having a really bad hair day at the side of the road as he is of a tree that ate a bicycle and couldn’t digest it.” Vicki Goldberg, in the foreword to Uzzle’s Just Add Water

While he is not a household name, Burk Uzzle deserves to be one. Born in 1938 in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was a working photographer by age 14 and, just nine years later, became the youngest photographer ever to be hired by LIFE Magazine. By 1967, he was a member of Magnum Photos, the great photojournalism agency of which he was elected president twice. He made iconic images of Woodstock, Cambodian war refugees, and the assassination and funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Even though he has traveled the world, Uzzle insists he is still most drawn to small towns and everyday situations. And yet you won’t find the expected or sentimental here. Uzzle’s pictures are often complex visual puzzles, playful but sophisticated arrangements of space and light. There are moments of absurdity, surrealism and irony, but he is never unkind.

As Uzzle says, “These photographs are an appreciation of America. Their structure, like that of America itself, evokes a melody of movement and collage – not an explanation. Unlike documents, they play tag with layers of reality, both interior and exterior. America is like that, conditioning us to zigzag and change with its constant, energetic barrage of many and various realities. But there is a melody in all the movement, and I can only feel it in America.”

Burk Uzzle’s new exhibit Burk Uzzle: American Puzzles opens at Steven Kasher on June 11.

Brand New Highway, N.M., 1970Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Park Slide, Washington, D.C., 1967Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Big Rooster, Wilson, N.C., 1970Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Wrong Way Arrow, Cony Island, N.Y., 1968Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Tired, New Jersey, 1967Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Dead Bird in Mirror, Florida, ca. 1975Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Ramp in Alley, 1975Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Boy in Market Crowd, Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, 1974Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Overpass Shadows, Connecticut Race Track, 1967Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Cans with Flag and Ram, Miami, Florida, 2001Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Two Donkeys and a Dog, S.C., 2004Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Pole Tree, Delaware, 1999Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Overpass in Curlers, Baltimore, 1967Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
New York Love, New York, 1975Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery
Man Under Autobus, Liverpool, England, 1964Burk Uzzle, courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

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