ABSTRACT
The relation between image and text has rarely been so important as today. Internet and CD-ROM drag them together into a hybrid form which in many ways dominates current network communications. Photography and text have shared the pages of print for almost 150 years, and their interaction has provided the grounds for some of the most challenging and theoretically sophisticated photographic art of recent decades. For one of the leading practitioners of this photo-text art, Victor Burgin, 'the use of photo-text was a way of establishing continuity of languages between the cultured tones of "high art" and the vernacular of the "mass media"'. 1 As both artist and essayist, Burgin points us towards the gulf that exists between the realm of pure media (the fine arts of painting and sculpture, for example) and that of impure, mixed and hybrid media that characterise the popular cultures of everyday life (billboards, TV, computer games and magazines).
