Singularities and Other Observations

Photography comprises a whole range of technological approaches (daguerreotype, micro-macrophotography, panoramic photography, photograms, etc.) as well as a variety of visually iconographic systems (spanning from a realistic-illusory shot of landscape scenery or a mesmerizingly real human face to abstractly scientific, schematic depictions of a magnetic field or oscillating point).

The photographer and theoretician, György Kepes, who concerned himself with the language of vision in the history of photography (Language of Vision, 1944) as well as the particularities of artistic & scientific photography and how they mutually overlapped (The New Landscape in  Art and Science, 1956), pointed out the fact that different types of photographic depictions influence the structure of our perception. According to him, it was photography and the various possibilities of photographic representation that brought about a paradigm shift (refraction) in the inherited, traditional modes of perceiving and seeing.

Ondřej Přibyl works across technological methods and iconographic registers systematically, conceptually, and with intent. His principal interest lies in vision and perception that is mediated and determined by the photographic image; at the same time he utilizes photography as a model or illustration of perception itself. His approach is technologically exact, almost pedantic – investigative while also open to inquisitive observation, intuition, chance, and obscure interpretations. In his work Singularities and Other Observations, the author repeatedly grapples with the realization that it is impossible to see the world all at once, as a whole, definitively. The frustrating uncertainty stemming from this realization becomes part of the subject-matter as well. In Přibyl's photography, we are thus capable of making out – even at its closest focus and the limit concretization of the captured photographic image – only certain singularities, traces, and indications.

Lada Hubatová-Vacková