A problem shared, Mpika road, Zambia

So from the 1960s to 1980s, photography theory wrestled between semiotics and traditional realism: the latter insisting that there is no difference between signifier and signified, and the former highlighting the distinctions and subjectivity inherent in semiotics. There are advocates of both theories but ‘by the end of the 1980s, photography finally began to be absorbed into art institutions […] as a dominant modern art form’ (Bate, 29) and some governments ‘acknowledge how powerful photographic images can be’ (30) by controlling advertising images and muzzling the press. ~ Peter Langmead in Postcards from Zambia