Though I found Victor Burgin's 1980s text, Thinking Photography, a hard text to understand, the core argument about the process of signification, namely, that meaning is never simply 'there', but is always produced, was very influential for me. As Burgin puts it in this interview at Eurozone this text was a questioning of the:

unexamined assumptions that then dominated writing and talking about photography. The notion of the "purely visual" was prominent amongst these, as was the naïve realist idea that photography is a transparent "window on the world". The former belief dominated "fine art" photography at that time, while the latter provided the ideological underpinning of "social documentary".

Burgin adds that since the 1970s and 1980s there has since been a massive return of "previous" frames of assumptions that had never in fact gone away. This return happens at a time when the art world and the art departments have provided media-ready art much as supermarkets provide oven-ready chickens.

He adds that he sees the critical task of art today as that of offering an alternative to the media. I am opposed to any form of conformity to the contents and codes of the doxa – what Rancière calls "consensual categories and descriptions" – even when these are deployed with a "Left" agenda, as I believe that in this particular case "one cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools".

My own sense of what is now fundamentally critical to the western societies in which I live and work is the progressive colonization of the terrain of languages, beliefs and values by mainstream media contents and forms – imposing an industrial uniformity upon what may be imagined and said, and engendering compliant synchronized subjects of a "democratic" political process in which the vote changes nothing. The art world is no exception to this process. Artists making "documentaries" usually encounter their subject matter not at first hand but from the media. The audience for the subsequent artworks will instantly recognize the issues addressed, and easily understand them in terms already established by the media. What is "documented" in such works therefore is not their ostensible contents but rather the mutating world view of the media, and they remain irrelevant as art if they succeed in doing no more than recycle facts, forms and opinions already familiar from these prior sources.