Victor Burgin quotes

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

#Indifferent

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

#Reality #Identity #Coherence

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

#Jobs #Communication #Artist

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 that is required is the talent to spot them and the skill to shoot them... But those moments of truth for which the photographic opportunist waits, finger on the button, are as great a mystification as the notion of autonomous creativity.
-- Victor Burgin

#Creativity #Skills #Waiting

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

#Photograph #Conviction #Complicity

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

#Political #Identity #Doe

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

#Art #Memories #Association

Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it.

I love portraying the totally indifferent person.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I would rather five people knew my work and thought it was good work than five million knew me and were indifferent.

To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.

Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

I’d rather somebody hate what I do than be indifferent to it.

I contend that every woman has the right to feel beautiful, no matter how scrambled her features, or how indifferent her features.