What’s Your Piece of Candy?

RM 215-218

In the Family Guy episode “Peter’s Got Woods”, the characters Peter and Brian Griffin famously snared guest star James Woods under a wooden box using a trail of candy as a distraction. Woods excitedly proclaims, “Ooh! Piece of candy!” with each step he takes closer to the trap. The scene is a nonsensical sight gag that pokes fun at illogic thought. I suggest that the joke may also be used to as a metaphor for finding your passion and discovering what makes you so excited that you lose yourself. The Decisive Moment is a term coined by French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to describe the brief instant when the significance of an event, as well as the precise organization of forms (in the camera’s viewfinder) gives that event its proper expression. For example, it is the moment after a person leaps to clear a puddle and before that person lands on the other side. It is the decisive moment that a photographer clicks the shutter and captures the subject suspended in mid-air. When speaking with younger photographers about their work I ask them, “What makes you excited”, “What do you see through your lens that is so memorizing it distracts you from the rest of the world”, “What makes you so excited that you lose yourself?” This is what I call the Decisive Distraction. It is the blind passion that propels us forward. Discovering what passionately distracts you is the first steps in knowing why you take the pictures you do.