Rene Balcer '71: A Hollywood Writer’s Real Focus

René Balcer is a Canadian-American television writer, director, producer and showrunner, as well as a photographer and documentary film-maker. Born in Montréal in 1954, he studied photography and visual representation at Concordia University. Inspired by such artists as Edward Hopper and Ed Ruscha and photographers Robert Capa, Leonard Freed, and Liliane De Cock, Balcer began his photography work in 1968. Eschewing studio work and staged images, Balcer searches for natural compositions that suggest a sense of disquietude and an implied or hidden narrative, as well as images that engage his interest in social justice.

Balcer is noted for writing and showrunning the television series Law & Order, and for creating and showrunning its spin-off series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. He was hired as staff writer on Law & Order's first season in 1990, becoming showrunner in the show's seventh season in 1996. During his tenure as showrunner, Law & Order won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.

In writing about legal issues, Balcer has drawn on his own experiences with law enforcement and his first-hand encounter with the brutal application of authoritarian power - at age 16, he was picked up as a suspected FLQ sympathizer during Quebec's October Crisis in 1970 and held overnight in the Montreal Police's infamous Station 10 where he was interrogated and beaten, before being released the next day. That experience, he says, gave him a harsh introduction to the reality lived by many disadvantaged communities.

While pursuing an award-winning career in film and television in Los Angeles, he has continued his photography practice, completing such photo essays as “Desaparecidos” and “Beleaguered Trees of Los Angeles.” On June 20, 2024, Balcer's first solo photography show in New York City opened at the Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary Gallery. The show, René Balcer: Forensics, focused on his photography work in Argentina - "In Forensics, Balcer’s photos speak to the complicity of silence during the years of modern-day caudillos in Latin America and to society’s willful blindness in the face of today’s rising authoritarianism in the Americas. In making these images, Balcer was moved by his own experiences during Québec’s 1970 October Crisis in his native Montréal.

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