Here is a shot of part of the closed Dominos Sugar Refinery taken from behing a chain link fence.  A wire from the fence was sitting directly in front of the camera lens, and neatly enough, you cannot see it.  It’s not magic, and I do not have the power to bend light.

Well, actually a camera lens does, sort of.  The lens redirects light.  The reason this works is that the light from the subject of the photo does not travel in a single straight line from the subject to the camera sensor.  Instead, the light travels in many many straight lines to all the minuscule points of your lens, which then redirects all of those lines in a focused fashion onto the sensor.  So, when an obstacle that is extremely close to the lens — so close that the lens cannot focus on it — blocks some of the light, there is enough other sources of light to make up fr it and you can see what would otherwise be blocked.

This only works, however, with a wide open aperture.  This was shot, for example, at f/1.6.  With a smaller aperture setting, enough of the alternative light gets blocked that you will see a dark blurry line blocking part of the image where the fence is.  With the aperture wide open, the only result of the obstruction should be either a slightly and  generally darker image or a loss of contrast.  Here, I got some dark and light banding.  For more info on this phenomenon check out this post, Invisible Pencils,  from Ron Brinkmann of the This Week in Photo podcast team.