What He Sees

Peter Nadas - Self Portrait with Rolleiflex (1963)

... not even photographers and personalities matter, only the pictures. / But then I want to know who I am among all these pictures. As though I had no choice but find the topographical sketch of my personality in others.

Peter Nadas in Kindred Spirits - Zielsverwant - Hungarian Photographers 1914 - 2003 (2003)

I was previously interested not in the moment of self-knowledge, not in my individuality, not in the peculiarity of my way of looking at things, but rather in the peculiarity that appears in the common, the individual formed in the perspective of the collective levels of consciousness. The individual version that appears in the monotony of the crowd. / Not the one-time thing, but the one-time thing that repeats and recurs, which the other person immediately recognizes as something of their own.

...

Their attention was not focused on objects, things and events, not on cameras, equipment or development techniques, but on images of pure intuition, which always wrote the light in their place or caused it to be written through them. 

...

… he prefers to see two-dimensional images and retains the narcissism later described by Ovid and Freud for a long time. Prefers to invent a bunch of things over time, looking at murals, wallpapers, photos, films and screens, just so his eyes don't have to constantly see three dimensions. For him, the two-dimensional images are not as painful and dramatic as spatial reality, such as the changeability of light and perspective over time.

... 

Painting, graphics and photography, just like pure observation, create a two-dimensional image of a multi-dimensional world. / The collective memory of humanity is based on these unmistakable, incorruptible images, the two-dimensional images of pure observation. / Not so with the dream image, which is inaccessible to others, but opens up the third dimension again in your very personal consciousness. Not accessible to reality, but to fantasy and illusion, which in turn stand outside the rules and autocracy of conventional vision. / But now he had suddenly or finally understood the reality of the world as an illusion. Aha, he said to himself, I must have known that the three dimensions were only the illusion of reality, but now I understand it too. I felt it. For now he understood how, driven by one and the same curiosity, he had always wanted to see behind everything.

Peter Nadas in Illuminating Details; An old photographer's farewell to analogue photography

 in Shadow Story ; Light History: Photographs (2021)
with thanks to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute Chicago