It seems to be extensively believed by photographers that meanings are to be found in the world much in the way rabbits are found in downs, and all t…

- Victor Burgin

The wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene [in a photograph] is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality …

- Victor Burgin

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 image…

- Victor Burgin

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…

- Victor Burgin

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

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

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

- Victor Burgin