Thinking Photography

This book brings debates within the theory and practice of communications and culture, in this case in phtotography and photography critisism, to a wider audience. 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”, 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 with social institutions — advertising, journalism, art — within a society with a history and within the unconscious.