Humans of New York (Humans of New York, 1)

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With his second inspiring look at the residents of New York, let Brandon Stanton be your guide as he uncovers the astonishing stories of everyday people. I’m still trying to figure out what that disgruntled couple in black-tie getup is doing standing in the middle of a lake.

You can take something that happened in someone’s life that seems very meaningless, and by crafting it into a story, you’ve taken something that is something that can be unexplainably tragic — like the brain cancer in your nine-year-old child — and turned it into something that speaks to people and gives them meaning. Flipping through HONY is like encountering a new house on every page, some that look perfectly familiar, some the likes of which you’ve never seen, and some that completely defy explanation. He concluded the section on Pakistan by highlighting Syeda Ghulam Fatima, the leader of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front, an organisation that works to free bonded labourers that were victims of predatory lending practices.

This contrast of texture grabs attention in expressing the outstanding personalities of New York has to offer. In March 2016, Stanton wrote an open letter to Donald Trump that went viral on Facebook, garnering over 2. Storytelling,” in this parlance, is best employed in the service of illuminating business principles, or selling tickets to non-profit galas, or winning contests.

Each story paints a raw anecdote of viewerships of people old and young, rich and poor, black and white. I’d maybe like to build a bridge in Wisconsin because there are a lot of people in Wisconsin who might not have bridges, but I don’t really know where Wisconsin is. This is people watching with words, and thanks to my friend Dawn for that description because I'm stealing it and running with it! But after cataloguing thousands of people, I stumbled upon the idea of including quotes from my subjects alongside their photographs.

We understand each entry as something snatched from right here, from someplace culturally adjacent, if not identical, to the watcher’s world; there’s a sense (and, given Stanton’s apparent tirelessness, a corresponding reality) that this could just as easily be you, today, beaming out from the open windowpane of someone else’s news feed.

Although the photo selection in the book may at first seem random and unintentional, there are evident themes portrayed throughout the book. Our ability to relate and empathize with people through seeing them and hearing their stories is what resonates most strongly in Humans of New York. Another example of the book’s use of visual repetition to emphasizes themes is shown in the spread below. The book influences people to start a conversation with local people and to share not only the subjects but their own as well.Following the Boston Marathon bombing, Stanton spent the week collecting street portraits in Boston, Massachusetts. In May 2016, Stanton shared a series of interviews with pediatric cancer patients at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.