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Dr. Stanley B. Burns The Burns Archive’s founder and CEO, New York City ophthalmologist Dr. Stanley B. Burns, acquired his first medical photograph in 1975. It was a daguerrotype of a South American Indian with a tumor of the jaw. Burns’ first published medical photograph appeared on the front cover of the New York State Journal of Medicine in 1977. Due to the medical community’s response to the image, Burns was asked to provide more photographs, and soon many of the NYS Journal of Medicine covers featured images from Burns’ collection, leading to the establishment of the Burns Archive. The first Burns Archive major exhibition was at Swirbul Library Gallery at Adelphi University in 1978, entitled, “A Thousand Words” exhibiting one thousand photographs from the ever-growing collection. Burns’ aggressive collecting and compulsion to research images and share his discoveries led him to lecture regularly on photographic history at various universities worldwide. He was appointed editor and photo-historian of assorted medical journals, including the Medical Archivists Organization of New York State, of which he was later elected president. Overwhelmed with the necessity to regularly produce text for articles journals, lectures, and exhibitions, Burns spent endless hours doing research at the New York Academy of Medicine, the Library of Congress, and at numerous New York Public Libraries. Using money earned from his successful ophthalmology practice, as he was never independently wealthy, he moved into a 19 room house in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, and in addition to growing his photographic Archive, began his own library of medical and photo-historical books, journals, and periodicals. Time Life had heard about the Archive and its designation as the most important emerging photography collection in the world, and in 1979 included an entry on it in their Encyclopedia of Collectibles. It was around this time that Dr. Burns and those involved with him came to realize the he had not only amassed an astounding collection of medical and historical images, but that he had also gained an encyclopedic knowledge of history in researching his hundreds of thousands of photographs. From 1981 to 1988 Burns had his own medical photo-history journal supported by Bristol Meyers Squid Corp. Twenty-seven quarterly issues were published during these years, with a distribution rate to physician specialists of between 24,000 to 28,000 copies per issue. The Archive’s first book, Early Medical Photography in America: 1839-1883, was published in 1983. This book attracted artist Joel Peter Witkin, and in 1987 Witkin edited Masterpieces of Medical Photography: Selections from the Burns Archive. With over a decade of collecting under his belt, Burns had amassed a common theme among nineteenth and early twentieth century images: diseased children being held up by their parents. He realized these photographs were not taken for medical purposes, but for memorial purposes. His collected images and research revealed that the taking of a photograph of a deceased loved one was a normal part of American and European culture at the time, and that postmortem photography was once a normal practice. In 1990, the Archive published the award-winning book, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America, and presented the haunting and often tender images of this forgotten practice. John Updike was quoted in a New York Times Book Review in saying that the subtext of Sleeping Beauty is one of "stillness and tenderness...and a mood of grieving love." An enormous interest in the topic of postmortem photography prevailed, and the Burns Archive produced two follow-up books: Sleeping Beauty II and Sleeping Beauty III. The books were sought after worldwide by assorted collectors, and spurred worldwide exhibitions, perhaps most notably at the Muse d'Orsay in Paris.

In 1995, Dr. Burns assisted in reformulating the genesis of Modern Art by aiding William Rubin, New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s Director of Painting and Sculpture, along with Helene Seckel, Curator-in-Chief of the Muse Picasso in Paris, with their Studies in Modern Art book, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon. The text affirms that the stimulus for Picasso’s painting of the same name was not African masks, as once believed, and as Rubin had written in a previous two-volume text. Instead, it had come to light and became Rubin’s belief through detailed evidence that the major influence was Picasso’s knowledge of the severe destruction of the face caused by extreme cases of syphilis, as Picasso had visited lazorettos, or quarantine stations, in Paris to observe these patients out of fascination. In the 1907 painting, we see five women, the first showing normal anatomy, the last, the familiar distorted face of Picasso’s modernism. Because of the horrific nature of the images of those with extreme syphilis, no known institutions had preserved photographs depicting it, thus they were unable to provide the photographic evidence. The Burns Archive provided an essay for Rubin’s text, along with photographs of the facial destruction, thus helping to establish a new view of the genesis of Modern Art.