ABSTRACT
This image was analysed by the photographer-theorist Victor Burgin in his essay ‘Looking at Photographs’ (Burgin, 1977). He makes the point that the photograph is about social class and ‘race’ but goes beyond this reading in saying that it produces visual structures linked with social structures in the world at large. His concern is not just with specic meaning in a single image but images in general. He wanted to show that photographic meaning is inuenced by socially agreed values and ideas (Burgin, 1982: 147-150). We may insist on seeing the photograph in our own way and yet socially agreed values and ideas still intrude. Burgin wants us to question what is taken for granted when looking at the photograph. In this way the reader is encouraged to think about the way interpretation of images is shaped by pre-existent ideas and perspectives. Burgin presents a model of analysis that challenges ‘visual connoisseurship’ or the tendency to like photographs for ‘what they are’ rather than what they ‘say’ or ‘do’. His approach does not rule out artistic appreciation of photographs but it does argue that the aesthetic is never innocently separate from a world of meaning and ideas. This approach is characteristic of the New Photography Theory that emerged in higher education in the late 1970s.
