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32 Dagnostaw Demski Going further, this perspective means that to perceive something, to recognize a thing, is to recognize a difference between it and some other thing or some other perception. Things are thus defined by and through their differences. Another way of saying this is that human thought is relational. We perceive and think in terms of relationships—and difference is a relationship (Rapport & Overing 2003: 105). If human thought is relational, then the perception of difference is also related to the category of otherness, and both—difference and otherness—result from building a community. Following Claude Levi-Strauss (1963), we can say that community describes the arena in which one learns and practices being social. In this sense, creations of difference and images of otherness are products of a process of exclusion. The category of difference organizes the picture of reality, indicating its major elements and the hierarchy of their importance. From the perspective of showing what was dominant and how it was presented in a manner characteristic for a given period of time, visual representations seen in the context of their own age gain another dimension, especially when we additionally compare them from the wider spatial perspective of central and eastern Europe but also over the period of a century filled with changes of global and local significance. Such an approach allows for a number of conclusions to be drawn, which I assume as a starting point for the discussion of the visual description of the reality, with the help of the category of difference, mostly based on the example of photography in the years 1945-1970 in postwar, socialist Poland. ‘The category of otherness is one of the important issues in anthropology, of which a variety of aspects have been discussed and analysed, most often in the context of a groups’ conviction about its own superiority and the inferiority of others.” Visual representations that articulate ethnic differences between us and the Others appear in situations in which cultures meet; when such categorization (us-them and the differences between these groups) gains increased significance. ‘These categorizations form structures of alterity characteristic for the given time and place and, as forms of knowledge, they often have a stereotypical character, in which case they represent the ideas of otherness. Apart from what is common—the presentation of the two sides and the changing degree of gap or distance—there are also other elements that may be treated as parameters worth taking into consideration: (a) describing the sides, or reality in general, by way of difference; (b) focusing on the axis of the dividing line (differentiating criterion); (3) exposing the degree of gap or distance between the observer and the observed (position of the observer); (d) presenting the medium itself used to present the difference (transparency), its material side, including technology and human factors—that is, strategies of immediacy; and (e) revealing (uncovering) the level of contact with/separation from reality (production of the real). > See e.g. Claude Levi-Strauss (1963), Zygmunt Bauman (2004), Edward Said (2005), and Homi Bhabha (1994).
