René Burri was born in 1933 in Zurich, Switzerland, where he photographed Winston Churchill at the age of 13. From 1950, he trained as a photographer at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (today ZhdK, the Zürich University of the Arts), and from 1953 to 1955 he worked as a documentary filmmaker and began to use a Leica while doing his military service.

In 1955, Burri became a nominee member of Magnum and received international attention for one of his first reportages, on deaf-mute children, Touch of Music for the Deaf,published in Life magazine. In 1956, he traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East and then went to Latin America, where he made a series on the Gauchos that was published by Du magazine in 1959. It was also for this Swiss periodical that he photographed artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein and Le Corbusier. He became a full member of Magnum in 1959.