A chance decisive moment—or a kink in the space-time continuum..?

The girl in the red dress was a chance encounter in one of Negombo’s street markets. She was just idly browsing, and I immediately saw it as a great colour-on-black-and-white picture. I only had my phone to hand, and as I raised it she turned and looked straight at me. 

One shot, and that was it. She carried on browsing, and I walked away. A one-in-a-million chance encounter. Or was it? Was it actually something else—a fateful kink in the space-time continuum that put us both in the same place at the same time? 

I’ve lost count of how often my seemingly undirected ramblings have brought me to what famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called ‘the decisive moment’. He was the pioneer of what is now known as street photography, and in the preface to his book ‘Images à la Sauvette’, he wrote: 

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.”

Scientists theorise that ours is a deterministic universe in which everything that happens was preordained at the moment of the Big Bang. If that’s true, it would mean that my ‘chance encounter’ with the girl in the red dress was decided 14 billion years ago. 

A sobering thought. True or not, I’m delighted it happened because it made a great picture.

Henri Cartier Bresson