Humans of New York - Brandon Stanton

What is the context?

What started out as Brandon Stanton’s simple idea of creating a catalogue of inhabitants of New York City took flight and became a worldwide well-known blog of photographs taken of strangers with their stories. Now Stanton travels to different countries around the world to seek new faces to capture and different stories to tell. 

Stanton had always been very passionate about certain things, such as the city of New York, photography, and filming. He went to the University of Georgia and after he finished there, got a job from a friend which went poorly after three years. He then moved to New York City and there he began taking portraits of strangers on the street. When he originally started to take photos for his catalogue, people would talk with him and he began to gather a collection of quotes and short stories from those he met. As he posted the photographs, he began to include these little blurbs and soon enough, he had a vibrant blog going. With his passion for photography, it took flight. Now, people follow his Tumblr account and like his posts on Facebook. Stanton initially had no plan for his project to become what it is today.

What is the artist communicating and how?

The pictures taken by Stanton of the people focus on the individual, leaving the surroundings blurred, thus emphasizing the focus he wanted to draw on the person/people he had taken pictures of. Also, by adding quotes said by the people, which Stanton had not originally planned, he gets the viewers to understand that each person is his or her own being, thus perfectly portraying the title of his series, Humans of New York. His portraits have now been published into a book with many of the stories he learned of in his endeavor to find and make a collection of stories of simply stranger on the street.

Photographer Brandon Stanton had never expected his blog to become so viral. Having this so, he did not particularly have a direction with what he wanted people to get out of it. When he initially began making the series, the idea of what he wanted it to become grew with the information he received from the people he talked with. He captures simple moving moments in life through his portraits, getting pictures of people with different expressions and such. Stanton then used his blog in an effort to raise money for the education of children in the inner-city. He worked with the principal of a middle school and had the initial goal of raising $100,000, but have now already raised $400,000, well beyond their wishes.      

Why do you find it beautiful?

There is this beauty in capturing moments and faces, ones which tell stories, whether or not they are a sentence long or a lengthy paragraph. In every one of Brandon Stanton’s photographs, he captures completely different faces, each one so unique with the different facial expressions and blurbs beneath the photos. What I love about Humans of New York and the pictures taken by Stanton are how he focuses on individuals, so that we realize how large the world really is with all of these different people from varying backgrounds. Adding the quotes from each person he takes pictures of gives them a backstory. It is nice to hear about the lives of random people rather than just seeing their faces in a photo. It gives them an identity and personality we can pinpoint, making them seem like any person we might run into or be friends with. By choosing to take photos of complete strangers on the streets of New York and elsewhere, it makes the series so random which is why I love it so much more, because we do not tend to acknowledge the strangers we walk past. In this way, Stanton allows everyone to be able to learn more about the people we never think twice of saying hello to.