Victor Burgin Quotes

#1. Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

Victor Burgin

#2. A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to combine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world.

Victor Burgin

#3. The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imagined plenitude.

Victor Burgin

#4. The only pertinent political question in relation to an identity [or its photograph] is not Is it really coherent? but What does it actually achieve?

Victor Burgin

#5. Our conviction that we are free to choose what we make of a photograph hides the complicity to which we are recruited in the very act of looking.

Victor Burgin

#6. Even the uncaptioned art photograph is invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.

Victor Burgin