Searching for the Universal Structure of the World Given the Inherent Subjectivity of Human Perception

From the beginning, photography itself was a new means of structuring the world and, as technology and artistic language evolved, offered further and further solutions to the systematic consideration of reality. Dating back to Talbot and Atkins’ early experiments with light-sensitive materials, Nadar’s experimentation with aerial photography, and Muybridge and Marais’ work with the phases of movement of living beings, the principle of typology and cataloguing in photography is still developing today. More new ways are being developed to find other perspectives of looking at reality through its thin cross-sections, the number and format of which, by now, create the conditions for its substitution. Nevertheless, reality is indivisible, and despite the principle of fragmentation that lies at the heart and essence of photography, as well as human attempts to turn the resulting fragments into a versatile construct, reality remains unified even if its part flows into the two-dimensional plane of the medium — it is only a new branch of it. In the end, the very definition and available ways of interacting with reality are limited solely by the possibilities of human perception.