A picture story behind the curtain

Looking through simple picture stories I of course hit POYi and CPOY first, if nothing else to kick off ideas and story frames in my head. But after hopping over to a few other sites I quickly found the piece “Go Inside the Magical Life of Europe’s Family Circuses“ on a traveling family circus that I wanted to share with the group. 

Just hearing the phrase traveling family circus makes anyone with a visual brain perk up immediately, but for me this story went beyond the expected performance, travel, and family portraits that I expected. The level of intimacy that the photographer was able to capture and share in her images allows the viewer to feel like they are really there, living behind the scenes and between shows with the family. Sure, the stereotypical images necessary for a family circus are present. We see the costumes, the performances and the places they live while on the road. But we also get to see the connections shared before a performance, the changing and the decompressing that happens off stage not as a step towards performing but as a step toward life behind the curtain. 

I think that capturing these intimate, personal interactions and moments is the weakest part of my shooting right now and so for me this piece was a good reminder of how beautiful those moments can be with enough time in a project. I guess in this way, some of these images are simply unattainable with a one week project like we start off with, but in other ways I want to push myself to being as close to these as possible and just to start thinking about these moments and images early for this project and longer ones.