The Unobtrusive Moment

She never saw me…

2009. The hills of Sapa, Vietnam. Rice patty fields that were actually hanging garden cliff mountain-ways soaking in water. Overweight but eager I trudged along the paths that led through little villages catering to tourists such as me; lean-to buildings filled with bottled drinks and indigenous Hmong crafted handiworks. At the bottom of the hills in Sapa, a Hmong woman was ‘assigned’ to me, her child wrapped to her side, her intent to see me through to the end to get her goodwill tithe.

My body ached. Weeks now of traveling. Far from being conditioned to endless walking. I had my own baby strapped on, $6000 worth of camera gear I didn’t know how to use; buttons switched to auto-mode.

Seriously, I didn’t know how to use my expensive Sony. I didn’t even realize that if I held the shutter button down for a few seconds I would get multiple shots. So every time I pulled the ‘trigger’ it was to get that decisive moment.

Consequently I came back from Vietnam with lots of blurry photos, badly framed slices of time, a load of crap. I know this because besides a handful of photos I ‘developed’ many years ago, I haven’t looked at these photographs until right now; as I plan my next project based on these photos.

I’ve decided that my personality is more an archivist approach to my photographic oeuvre. I can only make sense of the hundreds of thousands of exposures arranging them in a timeline of when they were taken. I am not the type to make a ‘Best Of’. Because my best is to shape my photographs with my memories, and my memories are, if you haven’t figured this out yet, a bit long winded. And I need context. So I construct my essays that I hope take you on a journey, and sometimes that journey has wonderful captured moments and sometimes they are blurred by grit and tears and loss and, to be honest, technical ignorance.

And also by my shyness. Because no matter how gregarious I can be writing, taking photographs are a private thing. I don’t want people to see me taking photos; that’s why over the years I’ve become so dependent on the relative secrecy of smart phones. I’m not trying to catch people unawares, I am trying to frame moments where I am a ghost and the action happens instead of my cajoling things into being.

This is why I consider myself more a photographer that catches a sliver of time with an unobtrusive eye.

And in Sapa, Vietnam, hungry, aching, not knowing that the next day I would basically crawl to a massage appointment administered by a young woman two-thirds my size but leaving me quivering with the force of her healing blows, I made the crest of a hill and looked across the valley and saw a flicker of red.

On my Sony I had a lens attached that when fully extended was a fifth limb. I held it up and I looked through the viewfinder and let the automatic whizzing gears focus on the spot, and voila! my Vietnamese Girl with a Pearl Earring (sans earring) coalesced as if she was exactly like me, a ghost, called down to stare across the great divide and catch me in her gaze.

She never saw me. I snapped my one hope-it-is-in-focus-why-am-I-so-stupid-to-think-I-can’t-get-another-shot, shot.

I don’t remember when exactly I saw this photo for the first time— days or weeks later— but I do remember the feeling that swept over me.

I’m fucking King of the Valley!