Turn around

look away from the center stage, and take a look at life taking place behind you. I think some of the best photographs I have seen from events were not so much of the events themselves but rather of the audiences. Their responses to what is going on can sometimes say something that a photo of what is actually going on cannot say. This is part of Alfred Eisenstaedt's brilliance in the photograph below. Instead of choosing to photograph a puppet show at the Tuileries park in Paris he turned his camera around and captured the response of the children-filled audience. Wide eyes of awe and faces of excitement that could only be fueled by shear passion fill the frame. I don't know what this puppet show was about, but it must have been amazing.

The audience of a puppet show at the Tuileries park in Paris in 1963. Alfred Eisenstaedt.

The faces of a reacting crowd can also make you feel that feeling you can only get from the shock of tragedy. That's what I felt when I first saw Patrick Witty's photograph (below) of a crowd's response to the first tower's fall on that tragic day of 9/11. As I stare into the faces in this photograph I could almost hear the disastrous sounds of the tower's collapse behind, the collapse that they are witnessing. The photograph almost becomes a mirror to America, their responses were also ours, and with that there is a sense of empathy to photo.

A crowd in the streets of New York City witnessing the collapse of the first tower on 9/11. Patrick Witty.