I love that photographs can capture a moment in time and tell a story unlike any other medium of art. It challenges photographers to see what is in front of them in new ways, through a new perspective, or a new lens. It makes people open to what is there, not just what you see at first glance.  

Over winter break I went to Paris with my friends, and towards the end of our trip, we were going to meet up with my friend’s brother and his group of friends who had just gotten to Paris from city hopping throughout Europe. We were planning on spending the day together, but we didn’t really have any concrete plans of what to do, as we had already hit up most of the major sites. We decided to walk around the streets looking for something to do together.  

 While walking the city streets we saw a huge herd of police cars drive past. We knew about the public transportation outages due to union strikes (which made it very difficult to get anywhere in the city), so we assumed that the police were being dispatched to a protest. We walked for a while in the direction the police cars drove in and thought we had lost the when we finally heard the roar of a crowd a few blocks away.  

Walking into the protest I was expecting there to be a general mood of anger and frustration over the current situation (as the protest was over pensions), but what I was surprised to find as I immersed myself in the crowd was the overwhelming sense of camaraderie between the union workers protesting together.  

Protestors were jovial, chatting with people marching close to, and starting call and response chants that everyone would pick up. Not too long after I got there, protestors who seemed to be coordinating the event, as they were the ones with megaphones, began giving people a signal to set off smoke bombs in the colors of the French flag. 

The reason I am proud of these photos is that they encapsulate why I love photography. I went into this protest with a preconceived notion what it would be like and how the protestors would be behaving, but through paying closer attention and letting what was in front of me speak for itself rather than me imposing a narrative on what was happening, I was able to see the beautiful civic involvement and sense of community and supportiveness that people were fostering right in front of me.