Tanysha with Flowers in Her Hair, Keres and Diné | for the Native Light Photo Collaboration

Tanysha With Flowers in Her Hair, Keres and Diné
Photograph by ©Craig Varjabedian

She entered the studio wearing a wedding dress and cape, garments woven with the weight of tradition, the kind one wears for a wedding at Santo Domingo Pueblo. Her jewelry—something old, something sacred—belonged to her mother, carrying the quiet gravity of lineage. Tanysha stood before my camera, her posture regal, her presence undeniable.

Does the photograph resemble one of Edward S. Curtis’s iconic portraits of Native women, draped in shadow and framed by nostalgia? No, it does not. Nor should it. This moment is not a re-creation, not a reaching backward. It is an invocation of what is, a reflection of what stood before me that day—a young woman and her mother, bringing their shared story into the light.

The studio is an old decommissioned power plant, its very bones humming with memory. What struck me most, though, was the light—light that poured in from the north, soft yet sure, brushing every surface with reverence. Painters like Johannes Vermeer understood this light, but I had only ever read about it, imagined it in the abstract. Standing there, I finally understood its sweetness, its steady grace. Irving Penn once wrote of the light from a north-facing sky, calling it “a sweetness and constancy” that surpassed all other illumination. He was right. This light, I thought, was a gift from the gods.

I made several exposures of Tanysha—frames that were technically sound, well-composed. But they lacked something, some ineffable quality that the moment seemed to promise but refused to yield. The photograph needed more than precision; it needed poetry.

Earlier that morning, in preparation for Mother’s Day, I had stopped at a nursery to buy my mother a hanging basket of flowers, blooms so vibrant they seemed to hum. Not wanting the heat of the day to wilt them, I brought the basket into the studio with me. I set it down near the girl and her mother, its colors vivid against the industrial gray of the power plant.

And then I saw it—the missing piece.

The girl’s mother, my assistant, and I began plucking the flowers, separating them from their stems with care. Slowly, deliberately, we arranged them in Tanysha’s hair, each bloom placed with the tender touch of ceremony. She stood still, patient, as if she understood what was unfolding.

I stepped back behind my Nikon, adjusted the lens, and found her again in the frame. Something shifted. I asked her to turn her head slightly to the right, the side of her face catching the light. Then I asked her to think of someone she loved, to hold that feeling in her chest and let it rise to her face.

Through the lens, the image came together—a young woman crowned in flowers, her gaze steady, her expression luminous. This was it. This was the photograph I had been waiting for. It was no longer just a portrait. It was something more—a quiet offering, a moment of compelling magic made visible.