Framed (from the series "US77")

In 1977, Burgin—a British painter turned Conceptual artist whose influential writings on photography combined Marxism, semiotics, and feminist theory—set out across the United States by car, armed with a 35mm camera to make his own still “road movie” of the kind that he knew and admired by Robert Frank, if only he could believe in the potential for pure, unmediated self-expression of which Frank was perhaps the final practitioner. Burgin’s series of pictures, collectively named “US77,” were off-kilter and grainy like Frank’s, but with the expressive heat turned way down; in its place were carefully crafted, seemingly unrelated vignettes “from life” superimposed in the corners of the images like the captions in fashion magazines. The text and picture were both inseparable and yet not quite consonant—carefully crafted “missed connections” where the text surpassed its function as caption to produce other images that would be read in relation to the image.