In his 'Art, Common Sense and Photography' essay Victor Burgin says that because we have separate words for 'form' and 'content' we are mislead into believing that they stand for totally distinct areas of experience. He adds that there is no content without form and no form without content.

This argued against those modernist photographers who claimed that they could present a totally content-free world of pure forms and those left activists (social documentary photographers) who claim that the autonomous power of the truth can be stated regardless of formal considerations.

1 Day Only, originally uploaded by poodly.

To ease his way out of this either or that framed our understanding of photography in the 1970s, Burgin turns to semiotics or semiology and argues that the photograph is a complex of signs used to communicate a message.

He says:

If you show me a photograph of a pile stones then, at an intermediate level, my eye receives visual noise just as my ear received verbal noise when you spoke to me in Greek, We can suppose that I have seen photographs since I was in a child and so have no problem interpreting these irregular patches of light and dark tones as representing stones. But beyond this? If I go on to remark that the photography depicts a temple, that the temple is ruined, and that it is Greek, then I relying on knowledge that that is no longer 'natural' , 'purely visual'; I am relying on knowledge that is cultural, verbally transmitted and, in the final analysis, ideological (I might think 'cradle of civilization', or damned Greek' according to when and where I happened to be born.