Reference no: EM133294629

Humans of New York

Back in 2010, Brandon Stanton was a young bond trader working in Chicago. He had a semiprofessional camera and spent some of his free time taking photos around Chicago. Then he lost his job and suddenly had a lot more free time, so he started taking a lot more photos. "Instead of updating my resume and looking for a similar job, I decided to forget about money and have a go at something I really enjoyed."

After traveling around taking photos in a number of U.S. cities, he moved to New York City with the goal of taking ten thousand portraits of ordinary people. Anyone who has tried going up to random people on the street and asking them if he or she can take their picture knows how hard that can be. The project came to be known as Humans of New York, and Stanton posted his best photos, along with a short caption/story, on Facebook and Tumblr. It took about a year, but finally he started getting followers, and talk. His blog got some positive comments from Tumblr founder David Karp, but the Washington Post says that most of the credit for Humans of New York's fifteen million followers goes to Stanton himself.

In a 2014 speech in Ireland, Stanton said it's all about being willing to just go up and talk to people:

The way I figured this out was just by doing it 10,000 times and getting beaten down, beaten down, beaten down, beaten down. There was no way I'm the best photographer in the world, no way that I'm the best journalist in the world, but I have approached over 10,000 people on the streets of what is stereotypically?.?.?.?one of the colder cities in the world and have asked them for their photograph. So I'm thinking by about this time I might be just about the best in the world at stopping random people on the street and getting them to let me take their photograph.

Stanton's blog posts for years took a standard format-they have a photo of one or two people along with a quote that tells a very short story about the person(s). But during the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, Stanton took to collecting cheerful stories from people. He sent a message to the twenty-eight million people who follow him on his varied platforms and asked them to submit their most uplifting stories. He then interviewed the people he wanted to feature through FaceTime.

While Humans of New York clearly exists and is shared on social media, it also illustrates the importance of social interaction outside of the online component. As Stanton says, the thing that makes Humans such a success is not the brilliant quality of the photos or writing, but the fact that he is socially interacting with all these people. Karp said, "It's become this community effort where people actually send in stories about the dude that makes them a bagel every morning who just always has a great story to tell or the dude with an epic mustache that I see walking down the street every day. They send in these stories about these people and Brandon goes, finds them [and] takes these gorgeous portraits of them, and uploads them with that story that led him to that person."

Since his start in 2010, Stanton has traveled around the world taking Humans photos in a range of countries including Iran and Pakistan.

How does Stanton get subjects to cooperate with his project, and how is this work social media? Secondly, after taking a look at several of his photographs and reading the captions that go with them, which one is a favorite of yours? Why? How does it capture your attention?