The ever-evolving portrait of New York City has been

painted through Gothams cats and its dogs, its buildings

and its parks, its diaries and its letters. Underpinning all of
those, of course, are the citys 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 Id

obsessed over markets in the same way Id 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 Beginners 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,

Brandons now-legendary online project documenting Gothams living fabric was born
at first a humble Facebook page, which blossomed into one of todays most popular

photojournalism blogs with millions of monthly readers. Now, his photographic census of
the worlds 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 Brandons 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 Brandons 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.

Something horrible has happened to Elmo.

Others are hopelessly charming:

Im eighty years old. An eighty-six-year-old man was just speaking to me in a

flirtatious manner, I believe. But his daughter pulled him away.

flirtatious manner, I believe. But his daughter pulled him away.

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.
Then there are the citys favorite tropes: Its dogs

and its bikes

Im ninety years old and I ride this thing around everywhere. I dont see why more

people dont use them. I carry my cane in the basket, I get all my shopping done. I can
go everywhere. Ive never hit anyone and never been hit. Of course, I ride on the
sidewalk, which I dont think Im supposed to do, but still
and the deuce delight of dogs on bikes:

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 Brandons 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.

Find more such daily mesmerism on the Humans of New York site, then complement and
contrast it with this photographic census of the worlds last living nomads.

Published October 15, 2013

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/10/15/humans-of-new-york-brandon-stanton-book/