'Taking Shots: The Photography of William S. Burroughs'

I took this book out of the library and it was excellent. It was about Burroughs' own dabblings in photography, and how this hobby extended into his practice - both as a writer and later, a visual artist.


Some really great content and thoughts from various people, including Burroughs himself. For him, photography was a creative hobby, a means of research, observing, recording, documenting, and referencing - all in one. Here are some notes..


"Burroughs' photographs are striking for their self-containment and lack of reference to other practitioners or genres"

"While they can be gathered into categories of a kind - street scenes, still lifes, collage, radio towers, people - his works sit outside of any canonical structure"

"his images are both fleeting and deliberate...processed in high street chemists, cheaply and with little thought"

Scenes of a crowd gathering near a car accident, photographed by W.B.

Pg 12. "the Burroughs photographic oeuvre bears overt traces of a diasporic displacement that resembles the movement and exiles of his life, and of the passing of time"

Pg 43. "immediate contemporaries were artists, not art photographers"

"instead they used photography as a form of research and a part of their art workss"

"the 'photo-projects' of conceptual artists was an anti-expertise, anti-glamorous quality about the photographs"

Further reading referenced within the book:

'The Photo Collage' (1963) - An essay by Burroughs, pg 16-17

'The Third Mind' (1978) - Burroughs and Brion Gysin