You’re caught in an arc of light during the splitting of an atom. Spilled into a stream of water flung against stark night. Or in a spaceship orbiting some distant star, shuddering in the dark. You’re floating along the top of a cold mountain lake among caked soil. You are speed, you’re glistening.

Flying Frying Pan is a project by Japanese photographer Hitoshi Fugo. Over the course of fifteen years between 1979 and 1994, Fugo photographed the same subject: an iron frying pan against the light of his kitchen window.

Imagine spending fifteen years photographing the same thing. A surface, a form, a light source, and a camera attached to a living, breathing body. These are the basic elements you can reduce most scenes to, and yet still. How does limiting your variables help you look at things, help you learn through images?

Keeping a practice with photography can be challenging. Keeping a practice with looking mindfully even more so. What I find beautiful about Fugo’s Flying Frying Pan is that when I look at his images, I imagine a man standing in his kitchen each day, looking for new ways to understand the things in front of him, searching for sense and potential in ordinary things, and doing all this while holding a camera.