I love sequences—the repetition, the rhythm. That’s why I’m drawn to conceptual photography and minimal dance.
For Mahler, repetition was a mortal sin. He used it—frequently—but never as mere duplication. His repetitions always carried a sense of development, of transformation.
In the work of choreographers like Lucinda Childs and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, repetition plays a central role. Movements return with subtle variations, forming shifting shapes and evolving patterns. You could see it as a sequence with its own internal logic—a rhythm that gradually unfolds.
Conceptual artists such as John Hilliard and Jan Dibbets embraced similar principles. In Camera Recording Its Own Condition, Hilliard presents a grid of seventy photographs (7×10), each depicting himself with his camera. The work maps every possible combination of aperture and shutter speed.
What resonates with me is this: small variations that, together, create a visual pattern.
For Hilliard and his contemporaries, though, it wasn’t about visual pleasure. It was about the concept.
As Sol LeWitt famously said:
“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”
The photo above this post shows a hedge in my garden, photographed over the course of some weeks. It’s about time, rhythm, and looking as an act in itself. A sequence contained within a single work—though, for simplicity’s sake, I still call it one photograph.