René Burri gauchos meet Tori Ferenc Polish borders in Leica’s Global Centenary Series of photo exhibitions

Leica Gallery London will mark the brand’s centenary with ‘Century in Conversation’, a joint exhibition running from November 8 2025 until January 8 2026.

Staged at the gallery’s Mayfair home, the show places work by Swiss Magnum icon René Burri alongside new photographs by London-based, Polish-born talent Tori Ferenc, creating a dialogue across eras, geographies and approaches.

Part of Leica’s global Century Event, this is the 11th instalment of the brand’s ‘In Conversation’ series, which spans 12 official Leica Galleries worldwide. Each chapter pairs a Leica Hall of Fame laureate with a contemporary photographer to spark a visual exchange. London’s edition sets the tone by contrasting the mythic sweep of Latin America’s pampas with the layered realities of Poland’s borderlands.

Burri’s contribution centres on his seminal photo-essay EL GAUCHO, made in Argentina following years of travel that took him from Europe through the Middle East and into Latin America. It sits in company with touchstone images from his storied career, among them Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara smoking a cigar during a 1963 interview for LOOK magazine, and the graphic cityscape of São Paulo, 1960 - pictures that have long become synonymous with his name.

The genesis of EL GAUCHO traces to Burri’s fascination with Don Segundo Sombra, Ricardo Güiraldes’ classic novel of Argentina’s horsemen. Initially unable to find gauchos willing to be photographed, Burri’s fortunes turned at a chance dinner where he met English adventurer Brian S. Kingston, who would write the accompanying text. Their host, Manuel Ordonez - an admirer of Robert Capa - helped set the project in motion; the next morning, the pair set off across the pampas in a new blue station wagon, immersing themselves for months in the gaucho’s world and capturing what Burri called a twentieth-century Don Quixote on film.

The work quickly entered print culture: in 1959, EL GAUCHO became the first of several specials Burri produced for DU magazine with text by Kingston. Nearly a decade later, he returned to the theme for Gauchos (1968), his second major photobook that year, introduced by a foreword from Jorge Luis Borges, further cementing the series’ literary and cultural resonance.

Facing Burri’s classicism is Tori Ferenc’s BORDERLANDS, a new body of work made by travelling Poland’s perimeter from east to west and north to south. Ferenc probes the edges of nationhood, where ecology, humanitarian pressures, society, and history intersect, mapping both physical borders and the mental spaces they define. “The long and turbulent history of movement and redefinition has left deep marks on the land and its people” Ferenc noted, framing her journey as a study of memory, identity and belonging.

Her photographs distil intimate encounters: a family living off-grid in the southeastern highlands, their self-sufficiency a quiet act of resilience; a sea-baptism on the Baltic coast that fuses faith with the threshold of land and water; and Bogatynia, the mining town at Poland’s tripoint border with Germany and the Czech Republic, where industry hums in the long shadow of the past. Together, Burri and Ferenc offer portraits of people traced against the lines of maps, and of the human stories that spill across them.

The exhibition takes place at Leica Gallery, 64–66 Duke Street, London W1K 6JD. On show are 10 lifetime-signed photographs by René Burri and 12 signed works by Tori Ferenc. All works are for sale.