Could we have a photography that weaves in and out of the subject, rather than hitting the reader over the head? If so, could the photographic fragments be organised into an essay form?
A photography that has been influenced by the skepticism of a Pyrrhonism that rejects dogma, and instead of claiming to know the hidden reality of things it accepts things as they appear. A photography that has a meandering, fragmentary style.
I'm thinking in terms of a photo book that has the form of the anti-systematic form of the essay --- lalong the lines of Montaigne --- as defended by Adorno in his Essay as Form. The essay as form accepts being fragmentary and provisional, with detours, risks, and playfulness.
A literary model that can be re-worked or re-modelled into a photo book in the form of an essay.
The photos in the essay aren’t built up in a linear chain. They stand in relation to one another, like the elements of a configuration, and illuminate the object from several sides. Meaning comes from this interplay as in Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas (1920s, unfinished).
So the photo book as essay resists the divide in modern photographic culture between rigorous documentation and merely expressive art whilst acknowledging the limitations of photography whilst embracing its own imperfection.