The Camera: Essence and Apparatus
Victor Burgin
MACK
English
Softcover
260 pages
150 x 228 mm
2018
ISBN 9781912339068
Victor Burgin is one of the most influential artists and writers working today. He came to prominence as a key figure in the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s. After turning to photography in his artistic practice he produced a series of groundbreaking theoretical essays that drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to think through the ideological role of photographs in the production of beliefs and values, and in the understanding of memory, history, subjectivity and space.
In the last decade or so, Burgin has worked with computer-generated imagery and the virtual camera. But rather than accepting a radical divide between so-called ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ realms, Burgin has emphasised the continuity of the virtual camera, the various physical cameras in use today, and the painted images of Quattrocento painting – all of which have their essence in the perspectival system of representation. Further to this, Burgin argues that no image is merely an optical experience – all images are essentially psychological events and thus virtual also. Inseparable from language, they form the psychical spaces of fantasy and projection, recognition and misrecognition. Whether on pages, walls or screens, in galleries or online, single views, or swarms of picture fragments, images are the making and unmaking of our sense of self, and the world around us.
This collection brings together for the first time Victor Burgin’s writings related specifically to the camera, following the shifts and nuances in his thinking over nearly five decades. Moreover, it allows us to chart the evolution of what the camera was and is, and how its affects are to be understood.
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/the-camera-essence-and-apparatus-br-victor-burgin)
About the Author
Victor Burgin (b. 1941) is a British artist and writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s (Harrison & Wood, 1992; Walker, 2001) and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting “the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud” (Burgin, 1976). His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. (European Graduate School Staff Page)
(source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/victor-burgin-834)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing between 20-25 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-us)
