Fun on the Web Weds: faces, eyes

I have always been interested in old photographs, and especially the faces, and eyes.  Show me photos of soldiers in uniform from the Civil War, or one of the World Wars, I will find myself staring at the various faces. Wondering what the person was feeling, thinking.  My parents have old family photos lining the stairwell from the first to second floors of their house, and I spent many a quarter hour of my childhood  gazing at all the faces, so familiar and yet so mysterious--my ancestors, and yet strangers.  

I might have been in middle school when I saw this famous photograph in a textbook; it was the first time I think it really hit me that history was made up of individual people who had feelings and reasons for why they did what they did.  It fascinated me:

Recently I stumbled upon this fascinating collection of phorographs, taken  by the New South Wales (Sydney, Australia) police department between 1912 and 1948.  Oh, the faces--and the stories to imagine, especially in the people's clothes, in their expressions, in the occassional repetition of a face. . .