Ken Burns traces his life's work to a collection neighbours took up
In 1962, when Ken Burns was almost nine, his mother learned she had months to live and medical bills had nearly bankrupted the family. Neighbours handed his parents six $20 bills. Burns says that evening taught him to look for small moments inside big history, the method behind his celebrated documentaries.
Born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1953, Burns grew up in an academic household that moved from Newark, Delaware, to Saint-Véran in France and to Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. His younger brother Ric also became a documentary maker. His mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Ken was three and died when he was 11. His father-in-law, the psychologist Gerald Stechler, later told him that all his work was an effort to bring the long dead back to life, a reading Burns accepted.
As a boy he preferred the family encyclopedia's history entries to novels. An 8 mm camera given to him on his 17th birthday produced his first film, about a factory in Ann Arbor. He turned down cheaper tuition at Michigan to attend Hampshire College in Massachusetts, which grades with written evaluations and lets students design their own concentrations. He studied with photographers including Jerome Liebling, paid his way partly by working in a record shop and graduated in film studies and design in 1975.
A year later he co-founded Florentine Films in Walpole, New Hampshire, with his teacher Elaine Mayes and classmate Roger Sherman, naming it after Mayes's hometown of Florence, Massachusetts. Its members work separately but release films under the shared banner; Burns's daughter Sarah has worked there too, and co-directed The Central Park Five with him in 2012. While living in Walpole he once got by on about $2,500 over two years.
His films usually examine American history and culture and usually reach viewers through PBS, often with backing from WETA-TV or the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Civil War in 1990 made his name, and the long-form series format carried through later projects such as Country Music in 2019. His honours include two Oscar nominations, two Grammys, three Peabody Awards and six Emmys from twenty nominations.
Source: Ken Burns
