In this Friday, Nov. 14, 2014 photo, friendly characters that looklike Jerry the mouse from Tom and Jerry, left, and Minnie Mouse welcome visitors at Afghanistan’s first amusement park called City Park in Kabul.

Excitement builds in the queue forming behind the barbed-wire security fence outside the park as children in bright clothes clutch their parents’ hands and hop from foot to foot in anticipation of the pleasures waiting behind the high concrete blast walls.

For the thousands of families who have visited there since it opened during a national religious holiday weekend in October, it is a rare escape from lives blighted by war, death and misery.

(AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

A portrait often pauses events and allows viewers to look into the eyes of the participants. Candid moments are usually how stories are told, but sometimes the interaction between photographer and subject tells its own story. Like a movie character who breaks the fourth wall, a portrait can arrest our gaze when we’re otherwise focused on narrative, forcing us to consider an individual. Collected here is a celebration of that special genre of photojournalism, the portrait.–

Portraits: The Big Picture.com

Participants of Miss Pole Dance South America 2014 and Pole Dance Argentina 2014 competitions, pose for a group photo before the start of the competition in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Photo/Natacha Pisarenko

My blog, basically.