I. Paradoxical Ontology of Light: Foundations of Photographic Creation
Light is both particle and wave, and within this paradox photography finds its foundation. Some of its behaviors – like a mirror’s reflection, the bending of light through glass, or the colors of a rainbow – can be described equally as photon trajectories or as advancing wavefronts. Others, such as the shimmering hues of a soap bubble or the spreading of light at a narrow aperture, reveal only the undulatory character of interference and diffraction. Polarization and double refraction add yet another dimension, where the transverse oscillations of the field shape what we see, as in the glare reduced by polarized lenses. At a deeper level, light is an excitation of the electromagnetic field itself, uniting electricity, magnetism, and optics – made tangible in the subtle rotation of polarization by a magnetic field. And in the quantum realm, light appears as discrete packets of energy, from the photoelectric effect that powers solar cells to the scattering of high-energy photons.
It is precisely this multifaceted interplay between continuity and discreteness, between waves and quanta, that endows light with its enigmatic character and its capacity to sculpt the photographic image.

II. Encoding Reality: Perception, Knowledge, Semiotics
Imaging, whether pictorial or photographic, cannot be reduced to the duplication of appearances; it is a mediation between the immediacy of perception and the structuring force of knowledge. Representation is always selective, encoded, and transformed by the conditions of its creation. Light becomes color and shade, shaped by convention and later deciphered by the viewer. Imaging thus emerges as a translation across registers rather than a seamless reflection of the world. Perception itself is never absolute; It is contextual, relational, and provisional. What the eye delivers is indeterminate until organized by memory, reason, habit, and expectation. This relativity introduces a tension between objectivist claims – that images capture external reality – and subjectivist accounts, which emphasize the perspectival, embodied, and interpretive nature of vision. In practice, every image negotiates between these poles, striving for the credibility of objectivity while remaining inescapably rooted in subjectivity. This negotiation extends into the modes of abstraction and idealization. Abstraction does not merely subtract detail; it encodes reality at a higher level of generality, condensing experience into visual signs. Idealization, by contrast, projects normative knowledge onto perception, producing types and models that claim to reveal not the accidental but the essential. Both modes disclose how imaging is governed as much by conceptual frameworks as by perceptual data. At its core, photography is semiotic. Marks, tones, and colors function as signs, intelligible only through sedimented codes, conventions, and shared practices of interpretation. Symbolic forms provide the horizon within which phenomena acquire meaning, while notational schemes regulate the very grammar of representation. Every image is therefore at once an illusion and a statement: A culturally embedded proposition about how reality may be construed and how vision itself may be understood.