The ever-evolving portrait of New York City has been painted through Gotham's cats and its dogs, its buildings and its parks, its diaries and its letters. Underpinning all of those, of course, are the city's true building blocks: its humans.
In the summer of 2010, Brandon Stanton – one of the warmest, most talented and most generous humans I know – lost his job as a bond trader in Chicago and was forced to make new light of his life. Having recently gotten his first camera and fallen in love with photography, he decided to follow that fertile combination of necessity and passion, and, to his parents' terror and dismay, set out to pursue photography as a hobby-turned-vocation. (For his mother, who saw bond trading as a reputable occupation, photography “seemed like a thinly veiled attempt to avoid employment.”) Brandon recalls:
I had enjoyed my time as a trader. The job was challenging and stimulating. And I'd obsessed over markets in the same way I'd later obsess over photography. But the end goal of trading was always money. Two years of my life were spent obsessing over money, and in the end I had nothing to show for it. I wanted to spend the next phase of my life doing work that I valued as much as the reward.
I had enjoyed my time as a trader. The job was challenging and stimulating. And I'd obsessed over markets in the same way I'd later obsess over photography. But the end goal of trading was always money. Two years of my life were spent obsessing over money, and in the end I had nothing to show for it. I wanted to spend the next phase of my life doing work that I valued as much as the reward.In photography, he found that rewarding obsession. Approaching it with the priceless freshness of Beginner's Mind, he brought to his new calling the gift of ignorance and an art of seeing untainted by the arrogance of expertise, hungry to make sense of the world through his lens as he made sense of his own life. And make he did: Brandon, who quickly realized that “the best way to become a photographer was to start photographing,” set out on a photo tour across several major American cities, beginning in Pittsburgh and ending up in New York City, where he had only planned to spend a week but where he found both his new home and his new calling.
And so, in a beautiful embodiment of how to find your purpose and do what you love, Brandon's now-legendary online project documenting Gotham's living fabric was born – at first a humble Facebook page, which blossomed into one of today's most popular photojournalism blogs with millions of monthly readers. Now, his photographic census of the world's most vibrant city spills into the eponymous offline masterpiece Humans of New York (public library) – a magnificent mosaic of lives constructed through four hundred of Brandon's expressive and captivating photos, many never before featured online.
These portraits – poignant, poetic, playful, heartbreaking, heartening – dance across the entire spectrum of the human condition not with the mockingly complacent lens of a freak-show gawker but with the affectionate admiration and profound respect that one human holds for another.
In the age of the aesthetic consumerism of visual culture online, HONY stands as a warm beacon of humanity, gently reminding us that every image is not a disposable artifact to be used as social currency but a heart that beat in the blink of the shutter, one that will continue to beat with its private turbulence of daily triumphs and tribulations even as we move away from the screen or the page to resume our own lives.
The captions, some based on Brandon's interviews with the subjects and others an unfiltered record of his own observations, add a layer of thought to the visual story: One photograph, depicting two elderly gentlemen intimately leaning into each other on a park bench, reads: “It takes a lot of disquiet to achieve this sort of quiet comfort.” Another, portraying a very old gentleman in a wheelchair with matching yellow sneakers, shorts, and baseball cap, surprises us by revealing that this is Banana George, world record-holder as the oldest barefoot water-skier.
Some are full of humor:
Damn liberal arts degree.
Others are hopelessly charming:
When I walked by, she was really moving to the music – hands up, head nodding, shoulders swinging. I really wanted to take her photo, so I walked up to the nearest adult and asked: “Does she belong to you?” Suddenly the music stopped, and I heard: “I belong to myself!”
Others still are humbling and soul-stirring:
My wife passed away a few years back. Her name was Barbara, I used to call her Ba. My name was Lawrence, she used to call me La. When she died, I changed my name to Bala.
I stepped inside an Upper West Side nursing home, and met this man in the lobby. He was on his way to deliver a yellow teddy bear to his wife. “I visit her every day,” he said. “Even when the mind is gone, the heart shows through.”
Above all, however, there is something especially magical about framing these moments of stillness and of absolute attention to the individual amidst this bustling city of millions, a city that never sleeps and never stops.
Whatever your geographic givens, Humans of New York is an absolute masterpiece of cultural celebration, both as vibrant visual anthropology and as a meta-testament, by way of Brandon's own story, to the heartening notion that this is indeed a glorious age in which we can make our own luck and make a living doing what we love.