Автор Victor Burgin (Editor)

Год издания 1982

Раздел каталога Теория фотографии

Thinking Photography, like other 
books in this scries, brings debates 
within the theory and practice of 
communications and culture, in this 
case in photography and photography- 
criticism, to a wider audience. Victor Burgin's book is concerned 
with the production of meaning in photographsfand so it is fully 
illustrated). 

A photograph has traditionally been understood as an expression 
of the photographer's personality, a transparent presentation 
of a real scene, or more recently in ‘modernist’ criticism as 
a purely formal object. 

Victor Burgin and his collaborators - Umberto Eco. Allan Sekula, 
John Tagg and Simon Watney - taking their cue from Walter 
Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer' (also reprinted here), 
and working from a wide range of photographs, challenge the 
concept of the autonomous, spontaneously creative artist, the 
idea of documentary truth in photography and the notion of purely 
visual languages. They develop an account of the production 
of the meaning of a photograph within social institutions - 
advertising, journalism, art - within a society with a history 
and within the unconscious. 

Victor Burgin is Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of the 
Visual Arts at the City of London University School of 
Communication. Educated at the Royal College of Art and at 
Yale, he has recently held arts fellowships in New York and 
Berlin, and in 1980 was Picker Professor of Fine Arts at Colgate 
University, New York. His first book was Work and Commentary 
and his well-known photographic work has been exhibited at the 
Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum of Modern 
Art, Oxford, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museum of Modern 
Art, New York, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Art 
Institute of Chicago.