Photography is perhaps the only medium with the potential to be in direct contact with experience of the world, and yet nothing has proven so difficult to achieve. Two opposing philosophies seem to be working against this achievement, 1) the passive scientific attitude derived from the 19th-century notion of objectivity which seeks to filter out the viewer's experience, and 2) predetermined aesthetic and narrative conventions that preempt direct experience of the object before the lens.

The Order of Things features two distinct exhibits, each exploring the potential of photography to function as a morphology of experience. The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge reexamines taxonomical and reportorial practices as an empirical catalogue while Natureworks  revisits topographical approaches to perceiving nature.