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 BurginOur 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 BurginThe 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