Privileging either the picture or the written text, post-conceptual photography has reinforced the view that all signs are interchangeable semantic units that signify in ways that transcend disciplinary and media boundaries. The principle of the democratic equivalence of signs that is implied in such a view has not only provided theoretical legitimacy for various forms of artistic hybridization – including the recent dominance of mixed-media models of photographic practices and the hybrid form of the image-text – but also offered a conceptual base to theorists who are guided by the idea of a common discourse that ignores traditional boundaries in art. Proponents of semiotics, for example, have long resisted the historical separation of language and pictures, and have challenged the rhetoric of purity in the visual arts that in the past sought earnestly to avoid the contamination of language. In the pages that follow, I do not seek to quarrel with these theorists’ political task of opposing cultural stratification and privilege in the conventional hierarchy of genres; I do, however, wish to question the assumed ontological equivalence of words and images implied by such an approach.
To do so, I draw on some key ideas on these issues from Roland Barthes and W. J. T. Mitchell, both of whom have insisted that photographs have properties that make them resistant to language and other coded systems of meaning production. Following this line of thought, I would argue that the photo-essay is a radical hybrid medium in which words and photographs interact in ways that exploit their differences, the linguistic part of the message being forced into a critical relationship with what Mitchell calls the roots of the photograph. In this way, the ‘reader’ is made aware of the tension between the two levels of meaning, which allows reflection on the formal object itself, as well as the prospect of critical engagement with what it stands for.
I would like to identify at the outset two distinct approaches to the hybrid photo-essay. One involves instituting and maintaining a clear separation between words and pictures – the example I offer is the work of Jeff Wall; the other effaces the disciplinary and institutional boundaries between image and text, as demonstrated in the work of Allan Sekula. Wall’s avant-garde naturalism has a traditional look about it. It usually consists of large photographic pictures with separate titles, and the subject matter is often explicitly inscribed in the discourse of art history – The Storyteller of 1986, for example [1], recalls Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. His works are commonly seen in print (or on screen), but their primary site is the art gallery. Wall thus secures an identity firmly in the realm of ‘art’. Sekula’s work, by contrast, seems a bit more ‘in the world’. Typically located in the street or in a book, it might be described as a ‘scripto-visual discourse’1 of the kind that challenges the institutional sites of art. Recent commentary has suggested that Wall is the conservative and Sekula the radical in this comparison.2 According to this view, the pictorialism of Wall is nostalgic revivalism (a reactionary turn); Sekula, on the other hand, openly confronts the historical separation of word and image and appears to challenge the institutional framework that sustains this distinction. He foregrounds and conceptualizes themes (maritime labour, for example) in a way that requires the viewer to think about the work’s mode of presentation as well as its subject matter. For Benjamin Buchloh, this is a reflexive practice that hovers between discourse and content.3
1 Jeff Wall, The Storyteller, 1986, transparency in lightbox, 229 × 437 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
What I have just described is a straightforward ‘argument’ between two contemporary artists, the key differences of which rest on the injunction against medium-specificity in late-twentieth-century art and criticism. Defenders of interdisciplinarity such as Sekula and Victor Burgin adopted ‘scripto-visualist’ practices that challenged traditional forms of naturalism on the one hand and the modernist privileging of ‘opticality’ as the basis for abstract art on the other. Instead, these and other postmodernists favoured a use of language and a form of hybridity that had roots in the first wave of conceptual art, proponents of which challenged the isolation of pictures from other systems of communication and argued that images are always constrained by words. An example of this linguistic turn is present in the work of Art and Language – a group that emerged in Britain in the 1960s – which represented a sharp reaction against the anti-intellectualism of the postwar art world and a repudiation of the hegemonic role of art criticism. According to Art and Language, the task for art was to ‘supplant “experience” with a “reading”’.4
By the mid-1970s, photography was increasingly being used as a means of documenting performance and temporary installations, a strategy that sometimes juxtaposed writing, images and other artistic forms. After a period of exclusive commitment to ‘writing as art’, conceptualists no longer saw language as the master code. Many recognized that pictures might form the anchorage for words, even in the most language-centred modes of conceptual art. Photography thus came to provide an intermediary position between art (meaning pictures) and language. This shift in medium preference among one-time conceptualists marks the beginnings of a pictorial turn that increasingly came to be dominated by photography, even if its use in the work of artists such as Burgin, Sekula, early Wall and Hans Haacke was self-consciously ‘unaesthetic’. Photography had a certain appeal because of its currency as a functional and popular mode of communication; and the fact that photographs (like words) are constituent parts of complex sign systems undermines the difference between ‘visual’ and ‘non-visual’ forms. As Burgin put it, ‘Simply because a message is, in substance, visual, it does not follow that all codes are visual. Visual and non-visual codes interpenetrate each other in very extensive and complex ways.’5 In a critical reflection on this kind of revelation, W. J. T. Mitchell has noted how art historians (in the Anglo-American world at least) suddenly woke up to the idea ‘that paintings, photographs, sculptural objects, and architectural monuments are fraught with “textuality” and “discourse”’.6 This belated ‘discovery’ for exponents of semiotic-influenced methods in post-conceptual and art photography was to become an article of faith. Opposing approaches that admitted ‘medium-specificity’ as an ontological pretender or any attempt to claim that photographs might contain essential differences in comparison with other types of signs were out of the question since the conventionalist argument was now accepted as gospel truth. The authority of French film theorist Christian Metz was called upon to finally dissolve the difference between word and image:
In truth, the notion of ‘visual’, in the totalitarian and monolithic sense that it has taken on in certain recent discussions, is a fantasy or ideology, and the image (at least in this sense) is something that does not exist.7
The irrational cult of the visual, for Burgin and for Metz, is thus negated since it belongs to a plurality of codes that are connected in ways that define it. From this perspective, the empirical view that visual images are influenced by language (or vice versa) is aligned with a more slippery, philosophical belief that visual messages are somehow structured from within by the non-visual influence of language. From his early work, Burgin thus engaged with mixed configurations of signs (images, words and sounds) that constituted ‘language systems’, such as ‘the visual arts’ or ‘cinema’. Increasingly, this focus on semiotics neutralized the word/image opposition. For many, it was motivated by a desire to break out of the academy and to make use of language-based models in the deconstruction of media culture. The imported New York School of modernism that filled the English-speaking art journals of the period seemed to have little connection with social existence. As John Roberts has noted: ‘Greenbergian Modernism was vanquished through the theoretical return of the artwork as sign.’8
The blurring of boundaries between word and image in the 1960s and 1970s represented a middling position between the linguistic and the pictorial turning points in cultural politics. If the rupturing of disciplinary boundaries caused a major upheaval at this time – and there is evidence that it did9 – it is nevertheless also true that these changes provided the background and inspiration for much of what was to follow. Among the many effects of interdisciplinarity (including pedagogic crossovers at university level), the coalescence of theory and practice was the most important. It spawned a mixing of practices and an increasing heterogeneity in art, including a wide and varied use of new media. This in turn led to a massive increase in political engagement among a generation of young artists influenced by identity politics and the semiotic guerrilla warfare of the earlier generation of conceptualists. Indeed, this shift in intellectual and artistic fashion produced a new generation of non-specialist critics and multi-media practitioners and a spate of new university courses devoted to ‘interartistic’ and cross-curricular studies.
This moment also produced the anomaly of a self-styled counter-hegemonic trend in art that quickly became fashionable and highly marketable. Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince in the United States – all working in the now dominant medium of photography – represented a new generation whose consciousness-raising projects fitted in well with the glamour and exclusivity of the art/business world that supported it during the boom of the 1980s and beyond. Kruger’s word play of 1987 signals the skill of the copywriter and graphic artist in the philosophic pun ‘I shop therefore I am’ [2]. The rhetorical forms of wit and irony in this kind of art established a bridge between theoretical discourse and popular culture. Kruger’s work in particular belongs to the honourable lineage of agitational graphic design. Despite its being for the most part restricted as a practice to the art world and its institutions (unlike the ‘agitprop’ it quotes), Kruger’s genre-hybridity represented an attractive extension to the more specialist discourse of political writing.
The interventionist and counter-hegemonic use of photography as a tool by second-generation conceptualists such as Kruger signalled a gradual shift to a mixed art practice. As I have argued elsewhere, the motivation in this work was often political. The full-blown return to pictures was, however, driven only partly by that motive. In the case of Wall, the ‘turn’ to a pictorial paradigm was in fact a ‘re-turn’ driven by a rejection of pluralism and of the hybrid forms of conceptual and post-conceptual art.10 Wall defended the embrace of pictorialism as a reaction against a recuperated vanguardism. (It is worth noting, however, that the upsurge in commercial and public support for progressive art in this period coincided with the return of the image as a key factor in postmodernist aesthetics.) In so far as the linguistic sign and the visual sign were deemed to serve similar functions, the intellectual and political functions of photography and the image-text were ideologically consistent with the original turn to the written word as an alternative artistic strategy. The return of the image in the late 1970s and early 1980s represents therefore not so much a self-conscious rejection of the language-based model (there was no sudden change of direction), but a desire to extend the self-reflexive critique of art towards an expanded field that increasingly encompassed a critical assault on commercial culture. The work of Burgin in particular remained strongly rooted in a language-centred epistemology.
2 Barbara Kruger, Untitled: ‘I Shop Therefore I Am’, 1987. Photo: copyright © 1987 Barbara Kruger; courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York.
For a more nuanced account of the pictorial turn we might look to older philosophical debates about pictures and words. The underlying thematic in this debate centres on medium-specificity or, more broadly, what Mitchell calls ‘the immanent vernaculars of representation’.11 Let us note how Burgin has struggled to position his own transdisciplinary practice in opposition to ‘specificity’ and the ‘traditional’ divide between words and pictures.12 From early in his career as a photographer, Burgin has sought to distance himself from the ‘single-image aesthetic’.13 Nonetheless, the ‘phantasmic’ element in his mature work clearly demonstrates an awareness of the image as something that elevates sensory experience as a basis for knowledge. In this sense, his photographs prioritize the world as foundation for the production of consciousness, and his work is reflexively concerned with this process. In some ways, this may look like a realist epistemology. Most of Burgin’s writing, however, rejects such a position; he seems always to doubt the specific status of pictures even while he exploits their ‘natural’ effects. ‘I want to stress the image not as illusion but as text [his emphasis]’, he says, and ‘mental processes exchange images for words and words for images. It’s not a matter of translation [my emphasis].’14 Which is to say, the ontological sameness of verbal and visual signs is underlined. Photography for Burgin thus became a pragmatic extension of his theoretical work as he was increasingly drawn to popular culture as a site for critical sabotage and deconstruction. In 1976, he designed and fly-posted a street poster that read ‘What does possession mean to you?’ The juxtaposition of image and text demonstrates a cut-and-paste technique symptomatic of the trend in the postmodern avant-garde for the use of ‘quotation’ and intertextuality. The poster uses an actual quotation (‘7% of our population own 84% of our wealth’ was a statement taken from the Economist), but it also ‘quotes’ a type of visual rhetoric in advertising in the image of a young couple as symbols of intersecting gender and wealth mythologies. More importantly, it shows Burgin’s interest in mediation itself. The work is explicitly political in its choice of material, but a deeper meaning attaches to the deconstructive politics of representation. As with Burgin’s later work, this poster typifies a kind of ‘knowing’ critique of the sign, a strategy in which the simulation of images becomes routine. It is a reflexive methodology in which the attempt to find a neutral meta-language of representation is always in danger of losing its connection with what Jessica Evans has called ‘external “societal” logic’.15 Alex Potts is another sceptic on this matter when he describes the dangers of infinite regression in the ‘wanton chase from sign to signs’ and ‘endless semiosis’.16 The concern here is about a polysemic world of spectacle that no longer connects with the ‘outside, a referent or a general public’.17 The determined opposition to ‘naive realism’ relies on a kind of quotation aesthetics in which all images are coded versions of other images. When the belief in the indexicality of the photographic message is held in suspension, or denied,18 it is treated like all other signs – that is, as a constituent part of a purely symbolic order in which meaning is for ever deferred. Meaning is thus always in doubt, and when a sign carries an ideological value it is ‘not the reflection of real social relations but the reflection of the social imaginary of its subject. The image of an image, it is deprived of all real denotation.’19 It is important to recognize how mediation sets off a procession of signals that seem to transcend objective reality. There is, nevertheless, a sense in which we can say that photographs have a complex and negotiable relation with conventional readings and are always a relay for something outside signification. The contrast with language is instructive in this regard since the photograph is ineluctably connected to its referent in a way that language is not. At the very least, we can say that the insistence on the importance of the process of signification as an exclusive realm of connotation seems to leave out something that never really goes away, even in the most dogmatic anti-realist theory.
Mitchell sets his sights on what he describes as the overconfident denouncement of the ‘natural’ and ‘non-conventional’ status of the photograph,20 in comments that relate to Burgin’s rigid conventionalism. Although Mitchell accepts that ‘“language” in some form usually enters the experience of viewing photography’,21 the suggestion that photographs are (as Burgin expressed it) ‘invaded by language’ seems to Mitchell to be not only overstretching the metaphor, but tantamount to suggesting an affinity between photography and language. To say that in certain ways, in particular circumstances, a photograph might be ‘invaded’ by language is one thing. Who would deny it? The anchorage of a picture’s meaning in language (and vice versa) is well known. ‘Invaded by’ is not, however, the same as ‘identical with’.22 For Mitchell, the metaphor should certainly be more carefully gauged to the problematic of the word/image opposition. What we are bound to say (following Mitchell) is that the ‘invasion’ – rather than dissolving difference – might in fact produce opposition and resistance. In other words, there might be ‘some value at stake in such a resistance, some real motive’, as Mitchell describes it, ‘for a defence of the non-linguistic character of the photograph’.23
The critical framework for a re-evaluation of the ‘non-linguistic’ status of photography (pace Mitchell) derives from Barthes’s Camera Lucida. The post-semiotic Barthes revisits an early provocation: the photographic image as ‘a message without a code’,24 a way of thinking that points towards the need for a reconsideration of the photographic image. As Mitchell notes, there is ‘one connotation always present in the photograph … it is a pure denotation; that is what it is to recognize it as a photograph rather than some other sort of image’.25 Mitchell describes a hypothetical wedding snap:
Conversely the denotation of a photograph, what we take it to represent, is never free from what we take it to mean…. Connotation goes all the way down to the roots of the photograph, to the motives for its production, to the selection of its subject matter, to the choice of angles and lighting. Similarly, ‘pure denotation’ reaches all the way up to the most ‘readable’ features of the photograph: the photograph is ‘read’ as if it were the trace of an event, ‘relic’ of an occasion as laden with aura and mystery as the bride’s garter or her fading bouquet.26
What is at stake here has importance for the way photographs are seen. In so far as there is such as thing as medium-specificity, we might consider how documentary photography, in some of its forms, connects the photographer and audience with what Roberts has called the ‘dialogic and communicative functions of photography’.27
Renewed interest in medium-specificity and the question of an ontology of the photographic image establishes a new connection between the earlier modernist engagement with the reportorial and sociocultural functions of photography.28 It marks a return to an engagement with the peculiarity of the photograph and its unique capacity to mediate between the experience of modernity and the perceived need to act as witness to that experience. The denotative power of the photograph is key to understanding this. Barthes’s emphasis on the paradoxical nature of the photograph serves to remind us that it always has two messages: one without a code (the analogical) and one that performs a rhetorical function. The first is denotative and the second is connotative. For Mitchell, this poses a significant sense of difference between the two modes of being. One must be ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ and the other is invested with meaning. There exists a sense of resistance between the two. The existence of these two levels suggests something like the distinction between photography and language. Barthes argued that the denoted and the connoted message are not in collusion (they are actually resistant to each other), but the latter (the coded message of connotation) ‘develops on the basis of a message without a code’.29 The parasitical relation of the coded message in this case (an example of photo-text) suggests that the value of photography lies in its apparent freedom from values – that is, in the suspended ‘reality’ of its pro-filmic moment. Mitchell has shown how this paradox of coded versus uncoded message production suggests a way of thinking about the imbrication of photography and language. There is an argument that it is precisely this sense of difference between the writing and photography that gives substance to the photo-essay.
Mitchell recognizes a certain power in the abrasive urban and regional subject matter of documentary photographers in late-nineteenth-century and Depression-era America. He refers specifically to the pioneering 1890 photo-essay by Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, and the collaborative work of the photographer Walker Evans and the writer James Agee in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of 1941 [3]. According to Mitchell, the power of these images derives in part from their shock value. But there is something else – something more than shock – that is to be found in the sense of resistance between image and text. Mitchell notes how the shift from reading to seeing is perhaps awkward. It is, nevertheless, this awkwardness that can be used in a reflexive and self-critical way:
to make the instrumentality of both writing and photography and their interactions serve the highest interests of ‘the cause’ [the left-wing idealism of the project] by subjecting it to criticism while advancing its banner.30
Mitchell’s point is that separation of image and text – as two distinct narratives – in Evans and Agee’s book establishes a tension between the two things. The refusal to anchor the images with a self-explanatory or rationalizing text allowed the two discourses to meet tangentially in a way that allows a partial but deliberately incomplete attempt to document its subject. The design of the publication leaves gaps in the narrative, inserts false names, and is resistant to journalistic closure and objectification of the subject matter. But despite sensitivity to formal considerations, it is rooted in something that keeps the reader’s attention. You might say the procession of signifiers has an end point, a basis in fact that conspires with the illusionistic trappings of the imagery. The meaning is elusive, but it retains a level of epistemological power that is arguably missing in postmodernist obsessions with the ‘shifting networks of symbolic forms’.31 Mitchell shows that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is an attempt at a truthful statement that draws attention to its own instrumentality as much as it does to the subject matter. The images are not merely illustrative; indeed, as Agee claimed, the images and the text are ‘co-equal, mutually independent, and collaborative’.32 Mitchell is keen to dispel the danger of the sentimentalizing narrativity of the photo-essay; he notes that some of the best examples do not merely raise consciousness, but disrupt the passage from reading to seeing and make the text interactive and challenging.
3 Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs, 1936, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans and James Agee, 1941.
The historical examples analysed by Mitchell, especially Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, invite comparison with Sekula’s attempts to breathe life into the formerly demonized genre of documentary, and in particular his use of the photo-essay in series such as Fish Story of 1995 and the slightly later Shipwreck and Workers [4]. What connects Sekula with earlier humanist documentary photography is his respect for the ‘naive realism’ of the photograph and his willingness to explore the theme of work. In some of the key examples within this tradition, the celebration of labour rather than consumption has important connections with democratic and idealist struggles for social and political change. But Sekula’s practice also represented an attempt to pursue a method that addresses the separation of the artist’s labour from that of the critic. In a statement that echoes Agee’s thinking in the 1930s, he proposed a type of mixed-media practice that, in the words of Hilde Van Gelder, ‘aspires to abolish the discursive schism between the critical essay and the artwork’.33 Sekula observes:
As soon as you create a relay between text and image, you undermine any purist claims for either text or image. Neither element is foundational. The image is no longer the truth upon which the text is a commentary or subjective gloss, nor is the text a pinning down of a truth that is otherwise elusive in the image.34
4 Allan Sekula, Shipwreck and Workers: Part of Titanic’s Wake, 1998/2000. Photo: courtesy of Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California.
In Sekula’s work we thus see a contemporary attempt to demonstrate the dialectical nature of the photo-essay in which language and photography interact as they might do in the many other hybrid forms that we take for granted in our daily lives. Burgin’s insistence that pictures almost never are seen on their own – that is, without the intervention of words – is correct. But that does not mean that pictures are the same as writing; moreover, the case for medium-hybridity may undermine important differences between media. What is more, Sekula’s projects also intermingle empirical research and critical comment with a certain resistance to curatorship and the aesthetic appropriation of the photograph. A work such as Fish Story, for example, seems to show a respect for lineages that reach back to the demotic traditions of earlier photographic exhibitions in which sequentially organized, archival projects formed a basis for engagement with class oppression, social fracture and the regimes of industrialized labour. The revival of the photo-essay and the rehabilitated practices of the photo-document may in some limited way halt the trafficking of popular culture as art. The photo-essay surely provides an important precedent and object lesson for current practice in the visual arts, in an era when new technology digitally blends all signs. It offers an approach that combines the radical interventionist strategies of two quite disparate artistic formations: the humanist projects of early twentieth-century documentary photography with the anti-aesthetic imperatives of conceptualism. It is significant that Sekula was scornful of the return to pictorialism in the work of Wall,35 whose failure, from Sekula’s perspective, is that it negates the critical aspirations of conceptual art and returns to the aesthetically conservative ideology of the ‘single-image aesthetic’.
Both Sekula and Mitchell have in their different ways argued for the value of the image-text as a means of sustaining a popular hybrid format that extends beyond the museum and art gallery and continues to exploit the critical interaction of writing and pictures. Sekula was following the legacy of the 1930s to find a dynamic role for photography and to retain a link with the social world. It is also significant, however, that Sekula, like Evans and Agee, avoided the conventions of captions and narrative structure so that, as Mitchell observes in his assessment of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the separation of image and text is not ‘simply a formal characteristic but an ethical strategy, a way of preventing easy access to the world they represent’.36 As with Evans and Agee’s book, there is no obvious way to read Sekula’s installations. There is an avoidance of sequential narrative forms where image and text are more simply juxtaposed. In Sekula’s work, the conventional ordering of images and text that audiences expect is challenged in a way that negates the production of fixed meanings, which in series such as Shipwreck and Fish Story prevents any objectifying or sentimentalized view of the worker. There is, nevertheless, a profound relation between the two levels of meaning as the ‘reader’ is invited to see the artist’s work as intervention rather than expression of objective truth. When Mitchell says that ‘our labor as beholders is as divided as that of Agee and Evans’,37 the same could be said of our response to Sekula’s work. The linguistic message is a foil that reminds us to see the picture as a different thing – it is an emanation of a ‘past reality’ that makes us think more deeply about the photograph’s resistance to language. Despite the challenging nature of these projects, we may note also an important shift in emphasis away from the politics of representation to a greater recognition of values that attach to the objects and experiences represented.
1 The phrase is used by Victor Burgin in Tony Godfrey, ‘Sex, Text, Politics: An Interview with Victor Burgin’ in Block, vol. 7 (1982), p. 9.
2 See comment by Sekula cited in Hilde Van Gelder, ‘A Matter of Cleaning Up: Treating History in the Work of Allan Sekula and Jeff Wall’, History of Photography, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2007), passim.
3 See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Photography Between Discourse and Document’, in Allan Sekula, Fish Story (Richter Verlag: Rotterdam and Düsseldorf, 1995), pp. 189–200.
4 Cited in Simon Morley, Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (Thames & Hudson: London, 2003), p. 146.
5 Victor Burgin, ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 1982), p. 83.
6 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994), p. 14.
7 The quotation is cited approvingly by Burgin in ‘Photographic Practice and Art Theory’, op. cit., p. 83.
8 John Roberts, The Art of Interruption (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1998), p. 147.
9 The editorial comment in Block, vol. 7 (1982) makes this point: ‘More than most other practitioners in the visual arts, he [Burgin] has indicated the relevance of textual analysis to the still image and the possibilities for a genuinely subversive art practice. Problems of gallery space and the lack of serious critical interest have led Burgin, like a number of other British artists, to exhibit primarily in Europe and America.’
10 Wall has observed: ‘My work has been criticised for lacking interruption […] but, already by the middle of the 1970s, I felt that the “Godardian” look of this art had become so formulaic and institutionalized.’ See ‘Interview: Arielle Pelenc in Dialogue with Jeff Wall’, in Thierry de Duve et al., Jeff Wall (Phaidon: London, 1996), p. 11.
11 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 14, n. 10.
12 Medium-specificity is condemned by Burgin as (among other things) a symptom of patriarchal authority. See his The End of Art Theory: Criticismand and Postmodernity (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and London, 1986), p. 47.
13 The phrase is cited by Van Gelder, ‘A Matter of Cleaning Up’, op. cit., p. 73.
14 Godfrey, ‘Sex, Text, Politics’, op. cit., p. 8.
15 Jessica Evans, ‘Victor Burgin’s Polysemic Dreamcoat’, in John Roberts (ed.), Art Has No History: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art (Verso: London and New York, 1994), p. 208.
16 Alex Potts, ‘Sign’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996), p. 19.
17 Evans, ‘Victor Burgin’s Polysemic Dreamcoat’, op. cit., p. 219.
18 See Joel Snyder’s scepticism on indexicality in James Elkins (ed.), Photographic Theory (Routledge: New York and London, 2007), pp. 369–400.
19 Alain Badiou and François Balmès, De l’Idéologie (Maspéro: Paris, 1976), p. 30. Cited in Kevin McDonnell and Kevin Robins, ‘Marxist Cultural Theory’, in Simon Clarke, Terry Lovell, Kevin McDonnell, Kevin Robins, and Victor Jeleniewski Seidler (eds.), One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (Allison and Busby: London, 1980), p. 166.
20 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 282.
21 Ibid.
22 See Burgin, The End of Art Theory, op. cit., p. 51. The military metaphor of photographs being ‘invaded’ by language signals his connection with the tradition that has produced a pervasive ‘denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought’. For a discussion of these issues, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994).
23 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 283.
24 The well-known phrase is from ‘The Photographic Message’, in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana: London, 1977).
25 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 284.
26 Ibid., pp. 284–5.
27 Roberts, The Art of Interruption, op. cit., p. 4.
28 See Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder, ‘Editorial’, in History of Photography, vol. 31, no. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 1–2.
29 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 284.
30 Ibid., p. 288.
31 Burgin uses the phrase in ‘Perverse Space’, in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press: New York, 1992), p. 236.
32 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 290.
33 Van Gelder, ‘A Matter of Cleaning Up’, op. cit., p. 73.
34 Ibid., p. 73.
35 Ibid., p. 74.
36 Mitchell, Picture Theory, op. cit., p. 295.
37 Ibid., p. 300.