Victor Burgin (b.1941) is known as a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of still and moving images. After 13 years in the United States, Burgin returned to live and work in his native Britain in 2001, taking up the prestigious post of Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud". His work is influenced by theorists and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. From his beginnings as a painter, Burgin’s dissatisfaction with the lack of rigor in image-discourse led him to immerse himself in the semiotics, psychoanalysis, and other philosophical and political discourses.