The Same Place Twice

There’s this train of thought, at least in my head, that once you’ve photographed a place, you’ve checked the imaginary box. It’s done, move on, find something new. Discover another hidden gem or chase another road nobody’s talking about, yet. It’s as if the value of a photograph is determined by whether you’ve stood there before. Standing still isn’t a high priority for a lot of people.

I don’t really buy that lately, anymore at least, if I’m being honest. There are places I’ve photographed dozens of times. The same intersection in Detroit. The same stretch of shoreline. The same abandoned building that somehow keeps pulling me back. If you stacked the negatives on a table, the compositions would probably look familiar, shit, sometimes they’d look nearly identical except for an out of place leaf. On paper, that sounds repetitive but, in practice, it never really feels that way, not usually unless it’s the farm.

Things change. The weather, the season, the quality of the light, a different car passes through, someone new walks into the frame, or a tree that was full of leaves is suddenly bare. Sometimes the only thing that’s changed is the second hand of the clock moving forward ten ticks of the tock.

Those are the easy differences to notice, the more important ones are harder to see. Every time I return or raising the camera, I’m bringing a different version of myself. One that maybe watched a YouTube video on metering for a scene and decided to suck less, or someone interesting entered the frame.

Maybe I’ve learned something since the last visit, become more patient, become less interested in making the perfect photograph and more interested in making an interesting one. Maybe I’ve spent the last year noticing details I walked right past before. Maybe I just want to mag dump the film in my camera?

A place never stays still, but neither have I, so why should the photograph?

People talk about photographers “finding their style” as though it and never changes or evolves again. Your style constantly evolves because your way of seeing evolves. The same composition you made five years ago, or ten seconds ago, isn’t being made by the same person. That’s a good enough reason to go back, or fire the shutter again sometimes.

We tend to celebrate novelty in photography with new places, new countries, new cameras, new projects. Social media certainly doesn’t discourage it, the algorithm always seems happier when you’re somewhere nobody else has seen, or sometimes it seems somewhere everyone else has been. Looking at you, Monument Valley and Roy’s Gas Station.

Photographs don’t become meaningful simply because they’re unfamiliar. Sometimes they become meaningful because they’re familiar.

There are landscapes painters have painted hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Writers return to the same themes throughout their entire careers. How many of Stephen King’s characters are writers? How many times does he reference the Dark Tower series in other books? Ka is a wheel. Musicians play the same songs for decades, and somehow they never sound exactly alike, except for fucking AC/DC.

Photography isn’t any different. A place isn’t a one time conversation, it’s an ongoing one. Returning isn’t admitting you’ve run out of ideas, sometimes it’s just that one visit wasn’t enough. Sometimes a place has more to say than you were capable of hearing the first time, even if that first time was only seconds before.

I’ve gone back to locations expecting to make the exact same photograph, only to realize the picture wasn’t different because the scene had changed. It was different because my attention had changed.

I noticed a reflection I’d ignored before, waited another thirty seconds, I chose a different moment to press the shutter. Just a collection of small decisions made by someone who had become a slightly different photographer, or gotten luckier that particular day. Alternatively, unluckier.

Photography is obsessed with moments, and moments, by definition, can’t be repeated. Even if I stand in the exact same spot with the exact same camera and the exact same lens, still shooting Ultramax, I’m still photographing a different instant in time.

The composition may be familiar, The photograph can be similar or an even a near facsimile. It can be superior or inferior, but it’s still new and different. It’s a different moment in a series of infinite moments ahead and behind.

Maybe that’s why I keep returning, keep revisiting the same themes and places. Not because I’m chasing the perfect version of a picture I’ve already made in my head, but because I’m curious what today looks like for a infinite amount of different moments. Tomorrow will look different and so will next year, so will ten seconds from now.

If I find myself standing in that same spot again years from now, days from now, seconds from now, with a camera in hand, I won’t feel like I’m repeating myself.

I’ll feel like I’m continuing the conversation we started before.