Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Vermont Bar Journal, Fall 2016, Vol. 42, No. 3 | Page 8

Pursuits of Happiness

very much photography, and it wasn’t until
10 years later that I picked it up again seriously, having completed six years of work
in Rutland and Bennington Counties at Legal Aid, and then four years at Vermont Law
School to direct the South Royalton Legal
Clinic.
JEB: I wasn’t aware of that.
EB: I was the second Director of the Clinic. Jim May is the Director now. I hired Jim
and Susan Apel, who are on the faculty at
Vermont Law School. Both are wonderful
lawyers. It was an incredibly vibrant and
uplifting job, I think one of the best in the
state for a lawyer, being the Director of the
Clinic. And it was exhausting. My wife and
I got married in 1982, and the first of our
two sons was born in 1983. We were living
first in Montpelier and then in Middlesex,
so on top of extremely long work weeks,
I had to commute. Our philosophy at the
Clinic was sort of the maximally labor-intensive model, meaning that the students
actually represented the clients and, at the
same time, the supervising attorneys knew
everything about the case.
In 1986, I left the Clinic, and went with my
wife, August Burns, who is now a portrait
artist, to Bolivia for her work.
JEB: Excellent. An artist family, you must
have talented sons too.
EB: Yes; we are very fortunate. August
had a whole earlier career in international women’s health, and she got a volunteer posting with Save the Children in Bolivia. The two of us and Emma Ottolenghi, the gynecologist that August worked
for at the time, and our son Asher, who was
three years old, all went. We were looking
for someplace out of the country where the
two women could do public health work,
and we were going to live there for a year.
It was a complete break from the work I was
doing at the Clinic.
JEB: Complete break. In Bolivia for a
year?
EB: We went to live, not just in Bolivia,
but in an extremely remote village called
Circuata that was about ten hours by hard
mountain road from La Paz. It was an incredible year, in a number of ways. It was
a village of 700 people. There were two
languages that were spoken there, Spanish
and Aymara, which is one of the indigenous
languages; some folks only spoke that. We
were thrust right into the middle of the
community. We reached out in many ways
and were reached out to by people there.
August and Emma did work at the medical
clinic there, and I cared for Asher and took
photographs.
JEB: Ah ha, the photos, I knew it.
EB: Right. It was an amazing experience.

8

You can see this trio of Elliot’s Senior Games photos
prominently on display on Langdon Street in Montpelier.

I had two cameras with me, both film cameras. I took color snapshots of people in
the village as gifts for them, and, after a
time, black-and-white photographs to exhibit. August was training midwives in the
countryside, and she became part of the
women’s community there. We had links to
people that really made them open to being photographed.
JEB: Right, so they didn’t have anything
like that and you could capture them after
you knew them better and knew what they
were like.
EB: Exactly. Those photographs became
an exhibit when I came back to Vermont.
They were shown at the Wood Art Gallery.
JEB: And when was this, the late 80s?
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • FALL 2016

EB: In 1988. Andrew Kline, a wonderful
photographer from Montpelier who had a
studio in town did the printing, beautiful
photographs of our Bolivian neighbors and
friends.
JEB: I wasn’t aware that you were doing that and showing it when we worked
together on cases over the years, and that
you have been doing this all along.
EB: Yes. It was very meaningful to me. It
was the first time that I realized you could
intentionally tackle a project through photography, where you were trying to depict
or express something important about people you knew or people that you came into
contact with.
JEB: You were just there for a year.
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