G. B. Burgin Quotes & Sayings

That gin-soaked little Nazi from the Gazette got pissed off when you didn't doff your hat for the national anthem," Burgin explained. "He kept bitching about you to the guy in charge of the press box, then he got that asshole who works for him all cranked up and they started talking about having you arrested." "Jesus creeping shit," I muttered. "Now I know why I got out of sportswriting. — Hunter S. Thompson

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

What sticks with me now is not so much the pain and terror and sorrow of the war, though I remember that well enough. What really sticks with me is the honor I had of defending my country, and of serving in the company of these men. — R.V. 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 can be used to generate new pictures of the world. — 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

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

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'. — 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 images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other. — 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