Victor burgin biography children

Surreal photographs accompany selections from the author's interviews, talks, and letters about art, criticism, and communication. At once poetic and provocative, Victor Burgin's "Some Cities" deftly juxtaposes photographs and texts in a manner that invites comparisons to the urban essays of filmmaker Chris Marker and cultural critic Walter Benjamin.

Best known for his artistic exploration of the divergent realities of images and words, Burgin is a gifted practitioner of montage with an acute sensitivity to all that is vibrant, uncanny, and appealing in the contemporary metropolis. From the cherry blossoms in a Tokyo park, to the skyscrapers of Singapore, it presents a series of stunning close-ups of the multicultural character of the late twentieth-century metropole.

Victor burgin biography children: Burgin makes photographic work like

A prime example of the "spatial turn" associated with contemporary cultural studies and postmodern theories of subjectivity, "Some Cities" is a tour-de-force of subtle wit and imagination that employs Burgin's visual and verbal skills in the project of creating a suitable artistic language for representing the complex and shifting realities of the metropolis.

Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context, Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the "media".

Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembene, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andre Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.

Victor Burgin here pursues ideas of "desire in and for a city, and a sense, desire of a city" - ideas first explored in his video "Venise" made for the city of Marseilles in , which reflected on the relationship of San Francisco to Marseilles. Attentive to representations of racism, identity and immigration, the book is designed to provoke a reading of visual art that is tied to contemporary cultural theory.