Full Frame: Acclaimed photographer Burk Uzzle comes into focus in 'F11 and Be There'

Uzzle's talent and humanity shine through in film by Jethro Waters

A great photograph invites contemplation. Photographer Burk Uzzle's work somehow goes a step further, ushering the viewer into a meditative state. The pulse quiets, the mind clears of distraction when looking at a Burk Uzzle picture. In his photos of mourners after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, one studies the faces -- of Coretta Scott King and the couple's young sons, but also of the nameless men and women absorbing his loss.

That quality of both arresting time and the viewer's attention has remained consistent throughout Uzzle's career, which began more than 65 years ago. The full breadth of his contributions -- from the 1960s until today -- comes into frame in the new documentary F11 and Be There by filmmaker Jethro Waters. It just played at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, and screens this Saturday at the River Run International Film Festival in Winston-Salem, NC. 

©Burk Uzzle

©Burk Uzzle

"He was the youngest photographer hired by Life magazine when he was 23, in 1964 I think it was," Waters tells Nonfictionfim.com. "And he's been working since he was about 12,  actually, as a professional photographer, taking pictures for the Raleigh News and Observer. He was delivering the paper while taking photographs for the paper on a little box camera when he was a kid." 

​His work at Woodstock in 1969 helped immortalize that event, and he took powerful images as a war photographer in Vietnam and Cambodia, documenting the impact of the violence on soldiers and civilians. What is even more remarkable about Uzzle is that he has made extraordinary photographs in every area of the photographic medium.  

"When I met him I realized that he had mastered documentary photography, street photography, waiting for the 'perfect moment' to happen. And that comes as a result of him having a really innate skill for that, for knowing what to wait for, and also him being under Henri Cartier-Bresson and being directly colleagues with people like that," Waters explains. "There's this 'laying in wait' vérité style to him in documentary photography that he just nails." 

There are fascinating scenes in F11 and Be There as Uzzle closely examines masterworks by famed painters -- ostensibly a different medium than photography, and yet he detects ways in which the masters demonstrated a photographic eye.

"There's this side of him that's this conceptual artist where he's studied fine art for a long time and then goes into the studio and it's all conceptual," Waters observes. "There is no 'waiting for something to happen,' until he gets his subject in there... He goes and spends days or a week or something with his subjects, hanging out with them and immersing himself as he learned to do in Life magazine with his subjects, before he brings them to his studio and takes a photograph."

Uzzle is likewise celebrated for his landscape photography.

"It's these really whimsical compositions and he has spent years, literally, on the road driving his van on small country roads, staying off of highways, just to find those landscapes, and those people that were in those landscapes," Waters comments. "It's intensely colorful and intensely whimsical."

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My conversation with director Jethro Waters

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In the landscape work, Uzzle's focus is often on the aesthetic, but there is a wittiness to other pictures or an implicit commentary on what Uzzle observes. The latter comes through starkly in a photograph of a provocative billboard that declares, "Diversity is a code word for #WhiteGenocide," directly beneath a dilapidated billboard cheerfully announcing, "Welcome to Harrison. Beautiful Town. Beautiful people... No bad neighborhoods." 

©Burk Uzzle

F11 and Be There shows Uzzle at work in his studio on a project for the Greenville Museum of Art in South Carolina, a large scale exhibition titled "Perceptions and Recognitions: African Americans of Eastern North Carolina." The photographs offer much more than aesthetic beauty -- coming from a white Southerner, they are imbued with a respect and love for the people and culture he is recording, residents of the same part of North Carolina where he lives. 

"It wasn't about, 'Let me find some Civil Rights heroes.' It was anybody and everybody," Waters explains. "There really were people that worked in kitchens. There were also people that were on Obama's inauguration staff that were standing in front of the gravestones of their ancestors who were slaves. He covered everybody. All of these people who are from that area -- that are some of the most important nuclei of this area --  [they] deserve to be made into huge works of art for them to experience and for the rest of the community to experience. That's the conversation that's he wanting to initiate for people."

Two photographs by Burk Uzzle for his exhibition "Perceptions and Recognitions: African Americans of Eastern North Carolina." ©Burk Uzzle

Release plans for F11 and Be There have yet to be determined, the director says. "Obviously, our main goal is to try to get it in front of as many people as possible to spread Burk's legacy and his message."

​Filmmaker and subject, though separated in age by more than 40 years, became close through the making of the documentary.

"We've become, I would venture to say, best friends. We talk all the time," Waters tells Nonfictionfilm.com. "He comes to stay with us in New York and I'm going to Wilson (North Carolina) and staying with him... He would always say, from the first month that we started working together, that we would finish each other's sentences... I'm obviously very much influenced by Burk because how could you not get a master's class within two years of working with someone like that. It's become a very special bond."

Director Jethro Waters with Burk Uzzle, subject of his documentary "F11 and Be There." Thursday, April 4, 2019. Photo by Matt Carey