After opening his studio in 1965, he was retained as documentation photographer by the Kunsthalle Bern, cooperating closely with curator Harald Szeemann and portraying many artists.
[3] After moving to the United States, Burkhard tried to find work as an actor in Hollywood, thinking that his distinctive face might make him suited for a career as a movie villain.
[5] From 1990 to 1992, Burkhard taught as a visiting lecturer at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, having moved to France in 1990.
[7] These images have been described as centering "on a stock of clearly defined subjects which he carefully extracts one by one from their context",[8] as for instance with the photograph of an arm that filled an entire exhibition hall in the Kunsthalle Basel[9] in 1983.
[4] A central theme in Burkhard's work was the depiction of the female sex, in an approach that has been interpreted as the "search for the primordial goddess, the focus of all desires".