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Justin Tan-Torres: Crowd awaits for the Giants to appear

This is a great picture.  The density is the first great thing about it, there's a lot going on and yet it feels simple and light and straightforward.  There are plenty of tiny narratives hinted at, from the wary (and weary) older couple foreground left, to the three boys in short-trousers from various ethnic-cultural backgrounds nestling in the trees, I think, head bowed, and there's a lot of drinking through straws from cartons going on.

That's all interesting detail but what lifts this image to a whole other level is the young man foreground right, the guy wearing glasses, his face partly obscured by the back of the young woman's head, a woman he is talking to with incredible focus.  We can see enough of his face to register the tousled hair, slight beard growth, the locked-on pleading eyes, the corner of a mouth that is almost a smile. But it is the form of the tree behind him (separate in reality but emerging from his body on the flat plane) which both dominates the photograph compositionally but which could be seen as providing an unexpectedly richer reading.