“another nature … speaks to the camera rather than the eye: “other” above all in a sense that the space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. While it is commonplace that we have some idea about what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all about what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

— Walter Benjamin, Kurze Geschichte der Photographie, 1931