Brandon Stanton, Human Behind "Humans of New York"

Brandon Stanton was born March 1st, 1984, in Marietta, Georgia, graduating from the University of Georgia with a degree in history. Fresh out of college, he started as a bond trader in Chicago but was fired 3 years later. This pushed him to New York to pursue his passion, photography. He's talked about his initial goal of "photographing 10,000 New Yorkers on the street, and create an exhaustive catalogue of the city's inhabitants." From this, Humans of New York was born.

He started in 2010 with just a compilation of his photographs onto a Facebook page. What first began grabbing the attention of his audience was how raw and full of emotion his portraits were. What makes his photos so unique is he doesn't just try to capture a picture of a stranger; he tries to capture the story of a human through their expressions and nature. He uses little post-processing and editing to let the photos be as raw as possible. One of his most memorable photos was of a lady dressed in all green. He didn't often take quotes or write stories about people. With this, he captioned it with a quote that said, "I used to be a different color every single day, but one day I was green, and that was a great day, so I've been green for 15 years." This post grew to be one of his most popular to this day. That's when he realized that people weren't just interested in seeing people; they were interested in learning about people. This realization is what brought him to his claim to fame.

https://www.humansofnewyork.com/

"He took a chance on an idea he had to take 10,000 portraits of people around New York City and plot them on a map like a census of the metropolitan area. The resulting project has turned into something larger than he ever could have expected."

-TIME magazine

By 2013, Brandon Stanton had close to 10 million followers. Time magazine recognized him as one of "30 People Under 30 Changing the World in 2013." He has travelled around the world, capturing what makes people "human". He's taken stories from people from over 40 countries, one significant being his trip to Pakistan. While Pakistan showed a human perspective outside of New York, it most importantly showed that humans still share similar hopes, fears, and aspirations even on the other side of the world. While there, he used his work to raise over 2 million dollars to help end slave labor in Pakistan. 

"If you stop people one-on-one and ask them: 'What are you thinking about all day long?' There are very similar themes in those answers. We're mostly worried about our families — our son's drug addiction, our father's illness, our wife's struggles with alcohol. On the flip side, there's our daughter's graduation, the person we met and are wildly in love with — these are the stories that represent the life being lived.

-Brandon Stanton

You can find more of Brandon Stanton's work from his blog, 

"Humans of New York," or from one of his many publications listed below:

 

Humans of New York (2013)

Humans of New York: Stories (2013)

Little Humans (2014)

Humans (2020)