Still Stuck on a Moment

These girls are about to perform a traditional Cambodian dance at the intermission of a youth Thai boxing tournament. This is a few moments before they are announced to the ring. A moment later, the little girls face lights up into an adorable half blushing smile, into the type of something you might see in a local newspaper. What you won’t see, is this slightly more ambiguous moment, for good reason. People don’t read newspapers seeking ambiguity or mystery. But this blog is no newspaper. Rather it’s the place I publish what the newspaper won’t, and shouldn’t. I’m not trying to flatter myself through this picture, it didn’t take a whole lot of craft or artistry, but boy does that little girl draw out my curiosity. I’m not someone who often yearns to inhabit other people’s minds, my own is trouble enough, but in this particular moment I would really like to know what she was thinking and feeling. Was she poised and ready to take the stage, as if dancing in front of others was a part of her makeup? Or, was she nervous and full of little children’s butterflies? I like to think that she was somewhere else, looking beyond this performance with some sort of profound self-assurance of her movements in dance and in the world.
For me, this is one of photography’s great powers: it has the potential to suspend a moment in such a way as to reveal its layers of depth, complexity and meaning; an incision into linear time through which we can get a view of the immeasurable content we normally only experience the edges of. I’m not saying that this picture does that for anyone besides myself, but its my hope that with time and hard work, that my images will begin to tap into this quality.