Bill Burke

A signed, first edition copy of Bill Burke's I Want to Take Picture.

• Bill Burke (American).
• Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1987.
• 60 pages.
• Folio.
• With black-and-white photographs and color reproductions of ephemeral items, printed in offset.
• Signed within an outline of Burke's hand on verso of the front free endpaper.
• Bound in photo-illustrated glazed paper-covered boards, endpapers illustrated with a montage of press cuttings.

Bill Burke studied Far Eastern art and religion at university while the United States was engaged in the Vietnam War. In the early 1980s, he traveled through Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand and Burma, where he photographed refugees fleeing there from Pol Pot's brutal regime in Cambodia. He subsequently entered Cambodia and took photographs of people there, including members of the Khmer Rouge. Burke used a Leica and a large-format Polaroid camera, reminiscent of the cameras that 19th-century colonial photographers had used, and the layout incorporates photographs of pieces ephemera from his travels such as beer bottle labels, bottle caps, cards from massage parlors and journal pages. In The Book of 101 Books, David Levi Strauss writes that "The triumph of this book is that it manages to reflect the mad experience of travelling in Southeast Asia while still reflecting on what it all means."