Categories and links to posts

I may be asking a dumb question, but I originally had my blog organized by categories to make things simple. (Photos, recipes, etc.) The problem was, when a user saw my home page, they would see a post for any of the 4 main categories, read them and came back the next day for a new post. It is not clear that these were in categories. So naturally when they returned to my blog and wanted to read say a post from March, they would go to my history and since the site was in categories, there was no way for them to search. So I kept telling my visitors to click on “Photos” to see that March post I made. When they did, they only saw the most recent 5 posts in that category. Then I would tell them to click on previous posts until they made their way to that specific post. This seems arcane.

What I am asking someone to help with my blog is to figure out a way to create a navigation centered around a category section, and then be able to view a sub navigation in that section of a chronological list of posts. Or at least a list of specific permalinks within a section. Out of the box, I can only see a way to post the most recent posts and the permalink only looks like this for EVERY post: (https://www.danmerk.com/photography) It would be nice to have on the home page a link to “Photography” and then in that section there are lists of months, or even Post titles that link to their permalinks.

Can anyone help me or direct me to an article on making this happen? Thanks in advance.