Reflections Between Memory & Perception

Edge of Humanity Magazine

6 hours ago

Photographer Nicolas Bernal is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. To see Nicolas’ body of work, click on any photograph.

My work explores the unstable zones of perception through reflections and shadows. In it, I question forms of indirect presence, close to memory.

The images I produce do not confront reality head-on. Instead, they offer fragments, shifts, and intermediary surfaces. Reflections duplicate space, displace reference points, and introduce a distance between what is seen and what is perceived. Shadows, on the other hand, function as traces: clues of an absent presence, vestiges of a passing.

I am interested in those moments when the image ceases to be descriptive and becomes uncertain. Where the gaze hesitates, where interpretation blurs, and where the visible is no longer enough to produce meaning. Reflective surfaces become projection screens, while obscure areas open up a mental rather than a narrative space.

My approach privileges a slow, silent visual language. The images belong to a sense of continuity rather than the decisive moment. They are conceived in series, like variations around the same perceptive state. Each photograph exists individually but takes on its full meaning in dialogue with the others.

This work is part of a broader reflection on memory and perception. The images do not seek to document a place or an event, but to evoke a lingering sensation—sometimes familiar, sometimes unsettling, and close to an altered state of consciousness. What is shown matters as much as what remains out of frame.

Through these reflections and shadows, I seek to produce open images that allow viewers to project their own experience. The work does not close itself off to a single interpretation, but offers a space of resonance, where the gaze, memory, and imagination can meet.