Published by Phaidon in 2013, René Burri’s Impossible Reminiscences gathers a selection of colour photographs made across his career, many of them previously unpublished. The book does not simply rehearse the images for which Burri became best known. Instead, it opens a less familiar part of his archive, placing colour at the centre and pairing the photographs with his own recollections of their circumstances and meanings.

Burri’s public reputation rests on work that helped shape the visual record of twentieth-century politics and culture: photographs of Che Guevara and Brasília, international war reportage, and portraits of figures including Pablo Picasso and Le Corbusier. Against that background, Impossible Reminiscences offers a revealing counterpoint. Its emphasis on colour expands the picture of a photographer commonly encountered through celebrated individual images and the traditions of humanist reportage.

The book’s distinctive character comes from the exchange between archival selection and remembered experience. Burri’s accompanying stories illuminate the photographs without reducing them to historical documents; they allow the reader to consider how an image survives differently in public history and in the photographer’s memory. Because the pictures span his working life, the volume also functions as a retrospective act of self-editing—an artist returning to his archive and identifying another line through it.

For collectors, the significance of Impossible Reminiscences lies in this conjunction of unfamiliar colour work, career-wide scope, and first-person commentary. Published a year before Burri’s death, it presents a late view of his own practice rather than an externally imposed survey. The result is an important complement to collections centred on his iconic reportage: a book that broadens the understanding of Burri’s visual language while preserving his voice alongside the images he chose to revisit.