I learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.
The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.
Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.
Run a single loop measuring 4.16667 miles within a single hour. Now do it again. And again. Now keep doing it – starting a new loop on the hour, regardless of how fast you finish the previous one – until there’s only one runner willing or capable of doing so. Welcome to the simple – some might say sadistic – concept of the Big Dog Backyard Ultra in Bedford County, Tennessee.
"Because this is a garden where things can be left out at night without being stolen, we're going to 'furnish' the garden with French café chairs that won't be secured in the ground, so people can move them to wherever they want to sit...It's like with the chairs being totally casual and relaxed and comfortable. They set a tone. There's things that you have to do to get the right feel, where it's all already there, but then, you know, 'Bing!' – there's a moment of recognition." The patterning of chairs pulled together in different ways by successive waves of visitors over the course of the day becomes an index of the shifting patterns of people that sit in a variety of arrangements to facilitate conversations and other intersubjective alignments, or simply to allow for a moment of private contemplation free from contact with others.