Pleasure in looking
I am watching a YouTube video about how Monet chased an "envelope". I haven’t heard this word used in this context before. Brian T. Martin, the creator of the video, describes it as the air, the light, or the atmosphere. He explains how Monet searched for it by painting the same scenes—a haystack, a cathedral, his water lilies—at different times of the day and throughout the year.
Brian is a photographer and has practiced a similar technique by shooting the same place, not only at different times but with different lenses, until "the subject disappears and only seeing remains".
He then quotes Saul Leiter saying
One of the things photography has allowed me to take pleasure in is looking.
This truly resonates with my approach to photography. The host adds his comment to Leiter’s:
And in many ways, that may be the very soul of photography. Not chasing, not collecting, but just learning how to look.
I agree.
