OMAHA INDIAN DANCER ANTHONY PARKER, SAN MARCOS, NEW MEXICO 2005
Photograph by ©Craig Varjabedian  All Rights Reserved

This photograph is one of many I made that afternoon, but it is the one in which you see that “moment” when everything fell into place. If you were to line up all the photographs I made of Anthony and Buck, you could follow and recognize the moment unfolding, up to the point where it happens and then fades. I call that the “architecture of the moment.”

The climax of those many moments is known as the “decisive moment.” Henri Cartier-Bresson elaborated on the phrase in his book The Mind’s Eye: Writing on Photography and Photographers: “Above all, I craved to seize, in the confines of one single photograph, the whole essence of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”

The concept of a decisive moment and the complexity of the entire experience figures in many of my pictures. I can see or sense that moment coming. The formal aspects of light and environment fall into place, and I experience a precognitive sense of the picture coming together. When I see it happening, it is as if cosmic tumblers are falling into place and I recognize a powerful moment. That recognition makes me release the shutter.

The resulting image in this picture reveals the light I experienced that evening, which completes the photograph. The moment Anthony and Buck looked off into the distance was that perfect moment when light, environment, and perception connected—a reality too beautiful for words but revealed in the photograph.