Randy Burton was born in 1953 in Claresholme, Alberta, and grew up on a cattle ranch there.
Burton pursued journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, receiving his Bachelor of Journalism in 1978. He then worked for The Western Producer until 1986, when he took a position writing for the Star-Phoenix in Saskatoon. He worked there until 2008 and then moved on to serve as executive director of communications at Saskatchewan Finance.
Burton's photography has been a part of his life throughout his journalism career. He began exhibiting his work in the early 1980s and has had solo and group shows in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Ontario. A 1989 Mendel Art Gallery catalogue comments: “His photographs, ostensibly straight, dead-pan images, have a quality of displacement or shift which provides a larger context for interpretation. Irony plays a large part in this process of delineating a particular place.”
In 1989, Burton and Regina photographer Don Hall published a book of black and white photography called Between Time and Place: Contemporary Saskatchewan Photography (Fifth House Publishers).
Randy Burton now lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.
