Jem Southam, an English photographer whose projects also unfold over many years, takes a similar approach. Southam often works on rockfalls and landslides, registering significant changes on cliffs and coasts in England and France. But some works in his series also record the barely perceptible movement of eroded material down a slope, the process geologists term “creep.” The intervals between Southam’s gorgeous large-format photographs allow for both radical changes and subdued ones, illustrating that the earth has a different sense of time than we do. Why does Southam revisit the cliffs of East Sussex? What drew Zoe Leonard to Manhattan’s Avenue A? Why did William Christenberry keep returning to Hale County? What gives Guido Guidi faith in Cesena? I can’t help sensing in these works, which photographically verify the passing hours or days or years, a quiet gratitude about the simple fact of return.

After a recent spell of travel, I returned home to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where I have lived for the past nine years. I began to take photographs of the park, not for the first time, but for the first time in an attentive way. The naturalist John Muir once wrote, “Most people are on the world, not in it.” I went back to the same sections, day after day, the same leaf-littered stretch of lawn, the same work site, the same stands of trees. I went in different weather conditions, in snow and rain and bright sunshine, and I went at different times of day. Shooting roll after roll, I began to accumulate a highly personal composite image of the park.

The seasons turned. The trees changed radically or not at all. At a time when politics made the flow of time feel hectic, shooting in the park slowed me down, and using film slowed me down further. I was looking at foliage in green and an infinity of browns, as well as the fine shock of dazzling white after a blizzard, the silvery grays after rain. In contrast to my usual approach to photography — selecting single images from shooting done far away from home — the photos from Sunset Park made me more inclined to consider unspectacular images part of the work. That work continues. On any given day, I pick up a camera and a roll or two of film and walk to a small grove in a small park in Brooklyn. The grove is there waiting, and I am always grateful at the reunion.