Art, common sense and photography by Victor Burgin

This is the third chapter of the course reader. In the article, Burgin considers the ideology of camerawork.

Photographs are often influenced by language and the ideological baggage attached thereto by virtue of having captions or text attached, but Burgin argues that the formal devices of image construction also contain ideology.

Photographic work may be criticised as 'manipulative' in the senses that a) the photographer manipulates what comes over in the image; b) that consequently the photographer's audience's beliefs are manipulated. Burgin dismisses this as inevitable:

"manipulation is the essence of photography; photography would not exist without it."

Using the productive capabilities of photography is no less manipulative than any other use of photography.

Only a self sufficient hermit can be said to be non political.

The photographer who has chosen to live in a society and enjoy its benefits, even though he chooses to put on blinkers when he squints into a viewfinder, is willy-nilly an actor in a political situation.

Habitualisation leads people to collude in their own repression and allows the rich and privileged to continue in their own ways is Marx's 'false consciousness'. The left photographer wishes to correct society's false picture of its actual condition of existence, wishes to help people realise that social order is not a natural order and can be changed but faces an apparent paradox:

that of seeking to penetrate appearances with an instrument designed specifically to record appearances and appearances alone.

Barthes noted at the exhibition Family of Man that photographs of mothers nursing babies in cultures as diverse as Switzerland and India tell us nothing of the child's life expectancy. Leads to conclusion that language is best adapted to making political statements, therefore the 'photograph can only serve the text'.

This is really the course of journalistic photography. Sometimes images really do tell more of a story than words - one thinks of Michael Burke in Ethiopia in 1980s stopping off at a refugee camp full of starving humanity - but more often it is an adjunct as, for example the current crisis in Ukraine demonstrates.  While pictures of Maiden - the demonstration that turned to violence in Kiev's Independent Square - were graphic and told that part of the saga very well, the longer -term ramifications, notably the annexation of Crimea, do not lend themselves to pictorial story -telling. The visual news media rely on live reporting from hotel balconies where the images add nothing to the message that we would not be able to understand if the interview were on radio.

Burgin distinguishes between form and content in an image. Photographers are aware of the use of effects in their work but usually thought to relate to the formal. The content is a given. Burgin argues that photography is not just a visual language - an image means different things to different people at different times - then we must accept that content too may be deliberate. He uses the example of contrast, specifically referring to an image of a poor man chasing a carriage full of rich men. The image could be a composite, or set up? More likely it is 'genuine' - the photographer took what he saw in a lucky or talented grab shot; however the fact that the image is lucky/shows talent in its existence does not mean it is lucky/talented in its meaning.

Burgin continues with some useful introduction to semiotics, specifically explaining  some of the concepts involved with rhetoric (useful summary for later in the course) and covers its analysis with some examples of advertising (again useful for next Chapter.

He ends thus:

"...we need to treat the photographic image as an occasion for skepticism and questioning - not as a source of hypnosis."

This is a very good article; well-written, articulate and lucid. It will be useful for Photography courses in the future as well as relevance here.