The Decisive Moment: a Daily Reality

I was looking at Stefan Zweig’s “Decisive Moments in History” book (original in1927, English translation by Ariadne Press, 2007) and as a street photographer, was intrigued by the use of the term “Decisive Moment” often attributed to Henry Cartier-Bresson. So I did a quick search and found that there were numerous books, some written before the Bresson era, where those terms were used. For example there is “The Decisive Moment” by Arthur Maxwell (1940, Pacific Press, original in Czech), “Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity” by Mark A. Noll (Baker Pub Group, 1997), and “Decisive Moments in the History of Islam” (2001, Goodword Books) among others. 

Henry Cartier-Bresson would have not been surprised by the widely universal concept of the “decisive moment” since he has stated that “there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment”. As a photographer he applied this concept, in a split second, to find “… the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression”(1)

… So, I had his statement in mind when I took my camera for a walk among people enjoying a sunny Saturday in June.

There were musicians attempting jazz improvisations, kids chasing old dogs that wanted to just sleep in a shady corner, and elderly men sitting on public benches wondering how the years went by. As I walked around, I was attracted by a young woman doing acrobatics with a hula-hoop.  She was gracious and seemingly oblivious to the busy surrounding. She was in her own “zone”, looping around the hoop and attempting various moves.

I watched her for a while and suddenly it occurred to me that her acrobatics did not provide Cartier-Bresson’s “precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” So, I decided to wait for that moment – will it happen? And if so will I be able to click, in a split second, to capture that proper expression?

I had my beloved 1960’s Nikkor-P 180mm lens to allow me keep a certain distance without interfering with the flow of events. I was a bystander, not a participant.

I did not know what I was looking for. Would it be that a passer-by will be hit by the hoop she was throwing and catching? Would she fall? Will a dog interfere with her acrobatics?

After a moment I realized that to give form and movement to the moment I needed to capture that moment “framed” by the hoop. Yes, the hoop would define the boundaries and would frame the moment.

With that in mind, I took a few split second pictures. This one comes close to what I had in mind.

  (1)Cartier-Bresson., H. 1952. The Decisive Moment. Simon and Schuster.

June 28, 2015

©Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

Walnut Canyon and the History of the Sinagua Indians

It was more than 100 degree Fahrenheit (38C) in Walnut Canyon near Flagstaff, Arizona during the hike. I did not know what to expect except that it was a canyon, at about 7000 feet altitude where ancestors of  today’s Hopi Indians once lived. Took my camera, a lot of water and a large- brim hat for that 300 meter descent into the canyon.

The vegetation is diverse and did have some surprises. In addition to the opunta, cholla and echinocereus cacti, I was delighted to see numerous ephedra shrubs. Did the Sinagua Indians use ephedra as a medicinal plant? There are walnut trees at the bottom of the canyon, hence its name. Winter snow and the monsoon summer rains filled the canyon with water allowing the Sinagua dwellers to have water and to store it for the dry months.

The two sides of the canyon are covered with remains of dwellings built by the Sinagua Indians. These are small room dwellings built into the limestone rocks. Walls were built with rocks and held together with mud as mortar. After almost a thousand years these masonry marvels seem to be mostly held together by the courtesy of time and the dry Sonoran Desert weather of Central Arizona.
First one has to look carefully to find the dwellings well hidden by the rocks and limestone caves. It is said that more than 100 such dwellings exist on both sides of the canyon, but I did see only a handful. Using my 1970s Nikkor 105mm lens here is the view from about 200 meters away:

A close-up shows the masonry work as well as the ingenuity of the Sinagua builders.

Who were these inhabitants who lived there for about 100 years then disappeared without a trace?

It seems that we do not know what these ancestors of the Hopi called themselves, but archaeologists refer to them as the Sinagua Indians. This is a descriptive adjective since in Spanish “Sin Agua” means “Without Water” hence the Sinagua were people who mastered the art of surviving with little or no water.

Their origin seems to extend from the Gulf of Mexico to Central America. The reason they came to Walnut Canyon may be a volcano that erupted in the Colorado Plateau in Northern Arizona a thousand years ago. Today it is an extinct volcanic cone called the Sunset Crater. Hopi oral tradition puts it this way:

 “Long ago the ground trembled, a big black smoke came and a big fire that came out of the ground.”

The surviving Sinagua Indians then searched for a place to re-establish, and they are believed to have built dwellings in Walnut Canyon, Tuzigoot and the area today known as the Montezuma Castle near Flagstaff, Arizona.

The Walnut Canyon is most picturesque and seems uniquely challenging: the small dwellers were built midway the sides of the canyon, while beans, squash and corn were planted on the sides of the cliffs. Finally, atop the mountains, the Sinagua found abundant game for hunting. The microcosm of the canyon is also most intriguing: the south-facing slopes are sunny and many species of cacti and agave still cover their flanks. The cooler north-facing slopes are covered with tall fir and ponderosa pine forests, giving the momentary illusion of being in the Northwest of the country.

And, without much fanfare, the Sinagua Indians disappeared around 1200 AD.  Why? Was there another cataclysm? Did they assimilate into other tribes and nations? Archaeologists do not have the answer, but according to the Hopi, who are the direct descendants of the Sinagua people,

“Qu’na katsina, the Bringer of Corn who dwells at the crater caused the eruption because their ancestors were engaged in koyaanisquatsi, or life that is morally imbalanced and corrupt.”

Pompeii, Sodom and Gomorrah, Mount Vesuvius and the Sunset Crater. Moral imbalance, corruption and their rumblings that caused cataclysmic tremors. It seems that social interpretations have much more similarity across time and continents than what geologists and archaeologists have yet to offer.

… But on that day late in June and with the 100F degree temperature all I could think about were a few lines from the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran about love. He wrote:

“When love beckons to you, follow it.
Though its ways are hard and steep.
And when its wings enfold you yield to it,
Though the sword hidden among its pinions may wound you.
..Even as love is for your growth so is it for your pruning.
For even as it ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall it descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.”

June 25, 2015
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015

To a Man with a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail

I was reading Stephen Hawkins’ “A Brief History of Time” and my mind was to black holes, Saturn rings, and orbits around stars and planets.  

When I went to take a few pictures, I was still thinking about celestial movements and harmony. In fact I always think about harmony when I am looking through the viewfinder of my camera. I try to find a co-existence of shape, movement and a story I can tell.

I took a few pictures, but did not develop the roll. I did not think I had captured much that morning.

Then a couple of nights ago, high in the Arizona desert, the sky was perfectly black and a sliver of the moon (waxing crescent) bright as a morning thought. I do not take pictures of the moon as my equipment is not designed for such. But just for fun, I took my 1970’s 210mm Kiron lens out of its hermitage and snapped a couple of times.

…When I printed the pictures I realized that indeed, my mind was somehow “seeing” shapes influenced by Hawkins’ book. When I looked at the picture of the man carving a horse out of wood all I now saw was his hat. It was an orbit around his head!  And I wondered if the discussion of the Big Bang, the creation of the universe was not symbolically captured by this picture where he was “creating” a horse out of wood, perhaps like the creation of man out of clay… Hmm.

Then I looked at the picture of the moon. The sliver was bright yet there was nothing special about this picture. What my eye had seen was the ordinary encounter with the image of the moon. 

Yet, I enlarged it just for fun. Now I could see the entire moon, hidden to the naked eye. What I saw was a bright hole in the sky from which a mushroom cap or a champagne cork was popping through. Was there a celebration on the other side of the sky??

Again, there are as many pictures of the moon as there are stars in the sky. But this one was MY moon, on that quiet evening in the high desert. It was captured with a lens that is not supposed to capture such images; and it was taken because a book had shaped my thinking hence my search for stories with a certain theme.

For a short while, the stars and planets, their orbits and mysterious attraction to each other had become part of my daily optic of ordinary things.

June 21, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015