Never finished. Only trusted.

Here's a story about Pierre Bonnard – it may be apocryphal but I like to think not. He is supposed to have slipped a small box of paints into the Louvre, persuaded a friend to distract the guard, and disappeared off to retouch one of his own paintings while it hung on the wall – finished, framed, hung. Job done. Except Bonnard thought otherwise.

I mentally refer back to this story more often than I should.

I have already detailed the ridiculous amount of time I have frittered away on the Studio Atlantic logo. The weight of the lettering. The blues pulled out of the sea itself (but which sea? The summer sea? The stormy sea? The early morning misty sea?). The casual swirl of the brush mark – should it approximate the ocean? Or is that too obvious?

Seasons passed. Tides advanced and receded. You'd better believe that generations of mayflies lived meaningful lives and died while I adjusted that font. Yet finally, I decided I had it. I sat back, pleased, and called it finished.

Then I woke up yesterday and it was wrong. Not a little bit wrong. Fundamentally wrong. Wrong in the way you cannot unsee once you have seen it. The way a crooked picture frame ruins a whole room. Of course it was. I am packing up and leaving England in two days time. What else should I be doing with my time?

So what does that say about a person? You could read it unkindly. That they cannot make their mind up. That perfectionism has tipped into something obsessive, a refusal to let anything be good enough. I have wondered that about myself more than once, usually at two in the morning, while lying very still beside a sleeping dog and conducting a full-scale moral inquiry into the spacing between two letters.

But I think there is a more charitable way of looking at it.

The work did not change overnight. I did. My vision sharpened. The version I made two weeks ago was the best I could do from where I stood at the time. Ten days later something began to nag and what I thought was solid felt anything but. This is not indecision. Or it is not simply indecision. Time removes the emotional noise and after a while, the work stops being the thing you battled into existence and becomes more simply a collection of shapes in front of you.

The point is not really the logo. It is true of this logo, but it is just as true of a collection of images made during an expensive tour, a complex printing process or a body of work you have been arguing with for a year. The hours you spent on the version you are about to throw out were not wasted. They were the cost of being able to see the next thing. And there really is no shortcut that skips them. Unfortunately, you do not arrive at the right answer by guessing harder at the start. You arrive at it by making the wrong one carefully, living with it for a day or a week or a month, and letting it tell you where it falls short.

Painters have always known this. De Kooning scraped whole days of work back to the bare canvas and began again on top of the ghost. Others simply turn the canvas to the wall and leave it there for weeks, refusing to look until they can do so without flinching. The looking-again is not an interruption to the practice. It is the practice.

Paul Valéry said a poem is never finished, only abandoned. I have always found that word a little bleak. Abandoned – as though you walked out on it. Maybe the word we want is trusted. At some point you trust that the gap between what you hoped for and what you made has closed far enough, and you let it go.

I wonder if this is a particularly unfortunate dilemma for photographers who are trying – for better or worse – to move beyond straightforward representation. We have picked an activity built on the instant – the captured fraction of a second. Cartier-Bresson called it the decisive moment and made it sound like a gift from the gods. Press the shutter at exactly the right thousandth of a second and the picture is made, whole, irreversible. No box of paints smuggled into the gallery afterwards. No scraping back to the bare canvas. Perhaps we were never meant to be photographers at all.

Except that is not the photography we are immersed in. I have spent years trying to pull the decisive moment out of shape. Long exposures that smear a single second into a minute. Frames laid over frames. The camera moved on purpose so that nothing is sharp and nothing is decided too soon. I think I have been quietly arguing with the medium longer than I care to admit. The fraction of a second was never enough. I wanted the painter's privilege, the one Bonnard took by force in the Louvre, to keep going back. Maybe that is not a failure. Maybe it is just the kind of photographers we turned out to be.

The trick, and it is the only practical thing I have to offer here, is to build the gap deliberately rather than waiting for it to ambush you. Make the thing. Then put real distance between you and it. Close the file. Print it small and prop it up somewhere you will pass by it regularly. In time you will be able to look at it the way a stranger would, the way you look at someone else's work in a gallery, with no investment in defending the choices made. If the time arrives that it looks wrong – and of course, it doesn't always – it is not that you failed. It is the moment you finally became a good enough reader of your own work to improve it.

So I have revamped this innocent little logo again. Gathered it up and twisted it into something else. Who knows how I will feel about it in a month's time? Right now it doesn't bear thinking about.

The question I am sitting with, and I will hand it to you rather than answer it, is this: how do you tell the difference between the version that is genuinely wrong and the version you have simply looked at for too long? Answers on a postcard please.

In the meantime I will go off and consider how the layout of the blog might be improved....