 Burkhard, who almost always worked in black and white, was best known for his large-format photographic series.These images have been described as centering "on a stock of clearly defined subjects which he carefully extracts one by one from their context", as for instance with the photograph of an arm that filled an entire exhibition hall in the Kunsthalle Basel in 1983.His work has been praised for its "hermeticism and poetic depth", characterized as that of a "hyperrealist dreamer" and placed in the tradition of Tanizaki Junichiro and Gustave Courbet, whom Burkhard admired; his photographic reflections on the painter's work were made part of the great Courbet exposition of 2007 in the Grand Palais.