Increasingly linked to our daily routines, photographs uncannily index and distort the real while mimicking our own biological mechanisms for seeing. Despite their commonly current form as dematerialized screen information, photographs emerged out of the natural world through the harnessing and organizing of observed physical phenomena into a program that produces predictable outcomes. In a time when photography is becoming increasingly non-material and preset, why consider it from a material standpoint? What does it help us to understand?
Starting with the idea that photographic phenomena originated and extend beyond the programmatic space usually associated with the medium today, Opera’s work expands the definition of photography by utilizing its most elemental principles, while staking out discrete territory within the broader field of representational space.