Is there a point where repetition becomes exhausted and turns into redundancy? Or, in essence, is everything we do nothing more than a continuous exercise in repetition? What does it mean to redo, reiterate, reproduce? If history repeats itself, if days follow one another in an endless cycle of sunrise and sunset, if the heart insists on beating to the same rhythm, then where does repetition end and exacerbation begin? And furthermore, is it possible that redundancy has a purpose? Or is it merely a meaningless echo, a reflection that has lost its origin?
Photography is, by nature, a game of repetitions. Among the many possible interpretations, there are those who see the act of capturing an image as the crystallization of an instant within an infinite sequence of similar moments. In this view, photography would become the fixation of something that would otherwise dissolve in time. When a photographer chooses a frame, he is often looking for patterns, rhythms, symmetries – visual structures that the world offers in its eternal game of repetitions. But not all repetitions are the same. Some are rituals, others are vices. Some give meaning, while others seem to empty themselves, although even emptiness can be an expressive element. Emptiness in art, philosophy and photography is not necessarily absence, but a space for resignification, a breath where the gaze finds itself.
The human eye tires in the face of excess. When repetition becomes predictable, it loses its strength, turning into noise, a resonance of something that has already been expressed more effectively. However, when repetition is used intentionally, when a pattern is interrupted at the right moment, when symmetry unfolds into something new, then repetition transcends and becomes discourse. The archetype of repetition is present from the symmetry of the human face to the arrangement of celestial bodies in the sky, from the pulse of music to the forms that multiply in visual patterns. The mirrored image, optical illusion, the reflection that suggests something beyond what is visible—all are manifestations of this recurrence that intrigues us. But what differentiates the repetition that bores from the one that moves?
Photography, by its fragmentary nature, challenges this question. When we observe a reflection in the water, are we facing an exact repetition or a new image, altered by distortion? When we encounter a succession of identical forms stretching to the horizon, does our perception seek out differences, however small, or does it surrender to the hypnosis of the pattern? What happens when repetition is subverted? When symmetry unravels? When the pattern is interrupted?
Perhaps redundancy is the collapse of repetition, a lack of variation within it. The moment a pattern becomes too predictable, it exhausts itself—and this exhaustion can become an artistic element in itself. The work of the artist, the photographer, the thinker, is to manipulate repetition and difference, to decide when to echo and when to break, when to continue and when to surprise.
What do we see when we look at the same image twice? What happens when something repeats itself until it loses its meaning? And if redundancy, instead of being a mistake, is a choice? A noise that persists until it becomes music? If repetition is our condition, perhaps variation is our only freedom.
The question, therefore, is not to avoid repetition, but to choose how to move within it—or even against it.
Written by Angela Rosana , learn more about me here .
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