The essence of revisiting a subject in photography.

Revisiting

What we have first in mind into many artistic fields is the word "inspiration". Inspiration can be seen as the motor or the fundamental motivation to experiment and produce a pure artistically expression through different medias or techniques. And photography is truly part of this (as for all others visual arts).

Having the motivation can be translate to a spontaneous envy to register something you have seen in the real or foreseen in your mind. This process can be pro-active or reactive and will trigger a series of actions on your part to (tentatively) produce an output that will represent your interpretation of you have seen and what, I hope, you will photograph!

Human are in perpetual evolution to try, to change, to sophisticate their ways of doing things. We can call it refinement or the search for better if not the best. When we stop doing so, we regress or die simply (or disappear) by not being able to follow progress of life.

Clock and Frame Fragmentation.

Revisiting is, in the same time, the observation what it was, what it became and what it would be. It is going beyond of a first view or a first impression of someone, something, some context or situation. It is like to try to represent less trivial aspects of it and better translate its profound signification, sentiment or motivation. Yes, we can be lucky to get at first glance the essence of the subject but consider this as a very rare event. This is also why doing professional photography (seriously) is so a difficult task considering the incapacity to revisit the subject of assignation more than one time most of the time.

For sure you can train yourself to photograph similar subjects and gain a precious experience and knowledge that will serve you in other critical moments. But very often during a professional assignment you may be never really able to explore, experiment and revisit your subject after giving you some time to evaluate your previous work and to plan a new approach to it. That is the beauty to be an artist (amateur or not!) because these factual constraints of commercial photography don't exist anymore.

A personal favorite among others: The chair.

How many times will I revisit a specific subject? In fact, it never ends because there is always something to observe, to select, to interpret a different way. This on-going eternal sophistication of our life is infinite and even after our own death, someone, somewhere can retake the torch to pursuit our path as we may have done ourselves for works from preceding photographers. That is the beauty of revisiting a subject and enhanced it ad infinitum.