Leica Gallery London has the honour of presenting a seminal photographic series EL GAUCHO by the Swiss Magnum photographer, René Burri whose images of the then Minister for Industry, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara smoking a cigar during the interview with journalist Laura Bergquist for LOOK magazine, in Cuba 1963 along with his image of Sao Paulo, Brazil 1960, have become synonymous with his name. 

Burri joined Magnum as an associate member in 1955 after a poignant story entitled Touch of Music for the Deaf focusing on the music teacher Mimi Scheiblauer and her lessons with deaf-mute children published in LIFE magazine. In 1956 he began to travel through Europe, the Middle East and eventually Latin America leading to his intimate documenting of EL GAUCHO. Burri had been fascinated by Don Segundo Sombra, the book about the legendary Argentinian gauchos by Ricardo Guiraldes which had at the time been recently translated into German. On arrival in the country, these men remained elusive and Burri busied himself with other projects in Argentina. His luck changed through a chance dinner invitation where he encountered the Englishman, Brian S. Kingston, who was living the life of an adventurer and was onside to write about the proposed photo essay. The host also that evening’s dinner, Manuel Ordonez, was a huge admirer of Robert Capa and wanted to facilitate this great yearning of Burri. The next morning, courtesy of Ordonez, Kingston and Burri set off across the pampas in a brand-new blue station wagon – discovering not only the world of the gaucho over a period of months but also capturing the ‘twentieth-century Don Quixote’ on film. In 1959 EL Gaucho became the first of several specials (with words by Kingston) that Burri would produce for DU. In 1968 he revisited the work for his second major photo book that year, Gauchos with a forward by Jorge Luis Borges.

Tori Ferenc is a Polish born photographer living in London. She tells complex stories through her documentary and portrait work. Like Burri she is driven to travel the world inspired by whispers of what might be, this series, BORDERLANDS builds on the life of Poland’s borders, seeking to unravel the complex interplay of ecology, humanitarianism, society and history that defines the physical borders but also the mental spaces that confine.

The Polish borderlands are places where past and present continually overlap and where memory, identity and belonging are contested and reimagined. ‘The long and turbulent history of movement and redefinition has left deep marks on the land and its people’ Ferenc noted, explaining that she travelled from east to west, north to south, witnessing people’s stories along the way. In the southeastern highlands, she spent time with a family living off grid, documenting their self-sufficiency and resilience, on the Baltic coast, she photographed a baptism by the sea, a ritual combining faith and nature at the threshold of land and water. At the tripoint border between Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia she documented a mining town of Bogatynia – a place fuelled by industry while living in the long shadow of the past.

Both photographer’s bodies of work create portraits of peoples, of a specific geography and how their human stories echo the lines of maps and the land in between.

The exhibition will show 10 lifetime signed photographs by René Burri and 12 signed photographs by Tori Ferenc. All works are for sale.