humans of new york photo essay

Humans of New York: A Vibrant Photographic Census of Diversity and Dignity

By maria popova.

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.

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.

Something horrible has happened to Elmo.

Others are hopelessly charming:

I’m 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.

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 city’s favorite tropes: Its dogs …

…and its bikes…

I’m ninety years old and I ride this thing around everywhere. I don’t see why more people don’t use them. I carry my cane in the basket, I get all my shopping done. I can go everywhere. I’ve never hit anyone and never been hit. Of course, I ride on the sidewalk, which I don’t think I’m 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 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 .

Find more such daily mesmerism on the Humans of New York site and see this wonderful conversation with Brandon about the winding road by which he came to do what he does, then complement and contrast it with this photographic census of the world’s last living nomads .

— Published October 15, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/10/15/humans-of-new-york-brandon-stanton-book/ —

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Brandon stanton’s humans of new york: the power of storytelling in documentary photography.

How does an out of work, amateur photographer manage to acquire a following of 18 million people and publish two best-selling books? “Through a lot of hard work and a refusal to fail,” Brandon Stanton says. Known internationally for his groundbreaking books, Humans of New York and Humans of New York: Stories , Stanton took the simple concept of taking photos of everyday people on the streets of New York City and is now using his popularity to bring attention to the daily struggles of people throughout the world.

Stanton’s story begins in 2010 when he was living in Chicago working as a bond trader. After having flunked out of college and later going back and graduating as a history major with straight A’s, this was the first time he felt he had a “prestigious” job. “I was no longer embarrassed in front of family and friends about where my life was going,” he recalls. But he found himself thinking about the financial markets 24 hours a day, and the job was not going well. To help relieve the day-to-day stress, Stanton started taking pictures of mostly landscapes from many different angles on the weekend. And then he lost that prestigious job.

“Getting fired turned out to be a surprisingly good thing,” Stanton believes. “I took a walk that day and thought, ‘What is it I want to do with my life? And it’s not going to be something that just makes me feel important.’” He also felt physically tired from having his thoughts and creative energy tied up for the past two years. He resolved then and there to spend the next few months to “make just enough money so I could control my time to do something I love.”

But he was terrified of taking photos of strangers. A pivotal moment came when he saw two boys on a subway who had the exact same expression on their faces. He knew it would make a great photo and he caught the eye of the mother who seemed to give her approval. Later he looked at the photo with a sense of pride, thinking that someone who had been taking pictures for 20 years might not have been able to capture this shot. And he got over the fear, thinking, “Maybe I could be the guy who stops people on the street and takes their picture.” He set an ambitious goal to move to New York City and photograph 10,000 people; he would work all day and make just enough money to live on for two months. He hoped this would get him an audience and bring enough attention to his photography that it might lead to future jobs.

What really made the difference in 2010 that could not have happened 15 years earlier is the power of the Internet. After taking interesting photos of people throughout the city, Stanton posted them each night in a blog he created and also on Facebook. At humansofnewyork.com, he took the extra step of creating a map pinpointing where the photos were taken, “in case someone wanted to get to know his or her neighbors.” When the time came to try and get his first book published, he could demonstrate the large following he had. “Fifteen years ago I would have had to rely on the blessing of publications such as The New York Times or New York Magazine to notice me and provide the publicity,” Stanton believes.

A Unique Photography Genre Stanton was too busy photographing out on the street to notice other documentary photographers’ work. But later on he learned there was an entire genre of the type of street photography he was doing.

“Almost in retrospect I realized these people were like my ancestors after I stumbled into it myself.” He particularly admires the work of Vivian Maier and Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist series. “He was the only photographer I knew about who created his own unique audience through his blog. Even though he was from the fashion world I looked at his work as a model I could follow.”

Choosing the Right Photo Subject Stanton has no set formula for choosing people on the street for his photos. “I look for people doing something interesting and then look for visual cues like a particular color on something they are wearing. Are they eccentric or unique? And when the project evolved into storytelling, I started looking for those who might have the time, which is hard to find in New York City. They might be sitting on a bench, taking a casual stroll, or are out smoking on a break, for example.”

After starting out taking candid photos of random people, Stanton soon found it was much easier to ask permission first. “I’ve been chased down the street many times by angry people,” Stanton recalls, “and I’m probably the only best-selling author who was treated like a street person.” He noticed little difference in the results between the candids and those for which he asked permission.

A heavy shooter in the early days, Stanton would take several hundred shots a day. “I learned photography by taking thousands of photos and making thousands of mistakes,” Stanton says. Today he takes about 10 to 20 shots of each person with maybe six or seven different people each day.

Stanton has always used a Canon digital camera and today has a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with a 50mm f/1.2 lens. He does a minimal amount of postproduction work, mainly because he doesn’t know Photoshop that well. “I might do a little Lightroom auto-toning, but that’s about it. I’ve always wanted to keep the attention on people and not get too bogged down with a flawless focus, white balance, or aperture.”

Storytelling One day Stanton was not feeling well and had nothing to post on his blog. So he pulled out a photo of a woman he refers to as the “green lady.” He remembered her saying, “I used to be a different color every single day. One day I chose green and that was a great day so I’ve been green for 15 years.” He decided to include this caption along with the photo and suddenly people were more engaged than with any other photo he had ever posted. “I realized continued success was probably going to be due to my ability to approach strangers and talk with them as opposed to just my photography skills. My goal now was to tell stories,” Stanton recalls.

“I stop a random person on the street and first create a zone of comfort. I ask questions such as ‘What is your biggest regret in life?’ and I get them talking. They might share with me things they haven’t even told their best friend or closest family members, such as affairs, abuse, guilt, successes, mistakes, or their wife’s cancer. I know there are two threads going through their head at the same time—fear and vulnerability in exposing themselves. But there’s also the appreciation of being heard.” Stanton conducts the interview at the same time he is photographing, and the whole process takes about an hour to an hour and a half per person.

Publishing the First Book It was surprisingly difficult to find a publisher for his first book, Humans of New York . “With over 200,000 Facebook fans at the time, I was feeling like a pretty big deal,” Stanton says. “My agent and I had a few meetings with publishers, and some said photography books don’t really sell and that my work was too ‘regional.’” When the time came for publishers to put in offers, one proposal was for a “cheap paperback” and the other came from St. Martin’s Press at the very last minute. The book went on to sell over 145,000 copies and was on The New York Times Best Sellers list for 29 weeks.

Not wanting to leave kids out of the concept, Little Humans was published in 2014. Also taken in urban settings, the portraits include a variety of ethnic backgrounds, unique outfits, and spontaneous poses, along with simple free verses such as “Little humans can do BIG things, if they stand up tall and hold on tight.” The following year Humans of New York: Stories was published, providing a glimpse of the subject’s life along with the photos.

Taking the Concept International In 2014, Stanton decided to take the Humans of New York (HONY) idea to countries all over the world. One of his first projects was a United Nations sponsored 50-day world tour to 15 countries, including Iraq, Israel, Uganda, South Sudan, and later Pakistan. “Since mostly negative narratives come from the media in these areas, I think the randomness of my interviewing everyday people helps present a more positive picture. People were happy to share their family stories—their struggles, hopes, and dreams. I think this project really helps to soften the image of a country in the eyes of the world.”

He also quickly learned that his followers are “just nice, nice people.” As one example, Stanton publicized the plight of brick workers in Pakistan who enter into a contract to work in a brick kiln for a short period of time, but due to predatory loan practices they end up owing a lot of debt they can’t repay. An Indiegogo campaign to help free them raised over $1 million in 12 hours from 40,000 donors, and today the amount totals $2.3 million.

Stanton’s latest project was interviewing patients, families, doctors, and caregivers from the pediatrics department of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “Cancer in kids is one of the greatest injustices of nature. I thought if you want to have a benevolent, spiritual view of the world, this is something you need to look in the face and examine,” Stanton says. So far he and his followers have raised over $4 million for pediatric cancer research.

Preserving the Brand Stanton is very careful how his HONY brand is used, and does not allow any online advertising on his blog or Facebook page. “I do no co-branding or paid placements, and do not rent out the HONY name to give influence to any other brand,” he says. “The only money I make is from book sales and giving about 10 to 12 speeches a year.”

In a recent speech to college students, Stanton’s parting words of advice were to never be afraid to fail. “You can only develop by failing—it’s an indispensable skill. Every great risk has a greater possibility of failure. Find something you’re scared to do and then put yourself in a position to fall on your face. You’ll eventually take the risk that’s going to pay off.”

To see more of Brandon Stanton’s work, visit his website, humansofnewyork.com .

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The Profile

Inside the Mind of 'Humans of New York' Creator Brandon Stanton

"i just always felt that there was something interesting about the intimate portrait of a stranger on the street.".

Brandon Stanton is part street photographer, part storyteller. He's spent the last 10 years of his life capturing the fascinating stories of ordinary people. He catches his subjects in various moments of time — from their most vulnerable to their most philosophical.

His popular blog, Humans of New York (HONY), features portraits of strangers who share intimate stories of strength , addiction , redemption , regret , and love .

It all began in 2010. Recently fired from his finance job, Stanton picked up a camera and hit the streets. His initial goal was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot the pictures on a map of the five boroughs.

He eventually began to interview his subjects and include a quote alongside their portraits. Stanton's photography project eventually evolved into a loyal following of more than 25 million followers on social media.

Stanton recently debuted his third book, Humans , which features the powerful stories of regular people across 40 different countries.

He also published a moving 32-post narrative on Stephanie Johnson , a 76-year-old woman who worked as a burlesque dancer named "Tanqueray" in the 1970s. Her health recently took a bad turn, so Stanton created a GoFundMe to cover her medical costs. Moved by her story, more than a hundred thousand people in the HONY community donated a whopping $2.7 million in a matter of weeks.

As a result of Stanton's dedication to telling the fascinating stories of complete strangers, Humans of New York has touched millions of readers over the years and turned into one of the best places on the internet.

Stanton sat down for an hour-long interview with The Profile, in which he explains how he develops intimacy with strangers, why his conversations are so transformative, and why it's natural for us to empathize with other people's pain.

This is one of the most comprehensive interviews Stanton has done in recent years. You can watch the full Q&A below:

If you prefer to read it, below is a lightly-edited transcript from our conversation:

Q: In 2012, you had 64,000 fans on Facebook . Eight years later, the HONY community has grown to more than 20 million people on social media. How does it feel to reflect on that?

STANTON: Whew. Well, I don't allow myself too much time for reflection, which might be a quirk of my character. The publication week for my third book just ended, and I texted my agent saying, "I don't know what to do with myself when I don't have anything to worry about. I need something to worry about at all times." So I'm normally obsessing over the next thing I'm doing as opposed to reflecting on the art of the career so far.

There's one story that I always tell to put into perspective how much the success of Humans of New York was outsized in relation to my expectation. I had been in New York for a few months, and I had been doing it every single day, trying to get traction, trying to get something going, and it really wasn't working. It's very hard to get that first core group of fans. This was at the very beginning of social media in 2010.

I remember my Facebook page started getting 10 new followers per day. I went to Central Park with my friend, and I told him, "If this keeps going like this, in three years, I'll have 10,000 Facebook fans." To me, that sounded like the biggest success that anyone could possibly ever imagine. Once those three years passed, it was something closer to 10 million. It was a thousand times larger than my definition of what success would've been.

There was one Christmas where all of your insecurities came crashing down, and you weren't sure this photography project would work. How did you keep your doubts at bay?

Just working. The Christmas you're referencing was the first one I was in New York, and I only knew two people in the city. During the Christmas break, the two people that I knew went home, so I was completely alone for two or three weeks. That was extremely tough. It was more of a loneliness thing than an insecurity thing, but I dealt with both of those in the exact same way, which is I went out and worked. It was the only thing that would keep me from the possibility of failing — and not just failing but failing in a very grand way. I had packed up everything I had, moved to New York to start this Facebook project ... to do something that seemed absolutely stupid.

At the time I was doing it, it seemed like the stupidest idea ever. There's that South Park episode about the underwear gnomes where the gnomes had this big plan to steal a bunch of underwear and somehow, that was going to equal profit. My friend always told me that I reminded him of the underwear gnomes. "So you're just going to take pictures of random people on the street and somehow that's going to equal profit? OK..." And that's how it looked for a long time. It looked very exotic, like I was doing something crazy.

I just always felt that there was something interesting about the intimate portrait of a stranger on the street. I felt that was compelling, and I felt that was interesting.

Street photography had been a thing for a while. Part of street photography sometimes included candid photography of people. There were much fewer portraits of people on the street where you stopped and asked them for permission.

I knew I was doing something new. I knew I was doing something that was compelling. I knew that if I made it my thing — if I owned that idea and I owned that space — that eventually the intrinsic value in how compelling it was would attract an audience large enough to sustain myself and make a living. That was my only goal at first — I just wanted to make enough money to continue doing it.

How did you make money in the very early days?

I was on unemployment. I had just lost my job, so I had a little bit of money coming in from unemployment. I got a few small odd jobs doing photography — weddings and little stuff like that.

The day my unemployment ran out, I did a print sale on Indiegogo, and it raised $30,000. And I thought, "This is going to last me three years." And then things started happening really quickly. The first view I got into how much social media allows you to scale was with Amtrak.

At that time, I had only been photographing for a year and a half. I wasn't that great of a photographer. I was still learning. But Amtrak asked me if I would do a shoot for them, and it was the only commercial job I've ever done.

They asked me how much money I wanted, and I go, "I don't know, you know? I'm just out here trying to make it. Whatever you think you could do would be great." It was an older lady, and I think I tapped into something maternal in her, and they ended up giving me $60,000 for two weeks of work. And to me, that was all the money in the world. All the money in the world. I thought, "I'm never going to have to worry about anything else with this for years." So that was when I finally started to feel secure.

For 10 years, you've picked up your camera day after day, year after year. You're the ultimate example of persistence and consistency. What has kept you going for so long?

In the beginning, it was just rock solid discipline, you know? And I can say that as somebody who flunked out of college and who, for the majority of my life, has not been a disciplined person at all. I flunked out of UGA because I wasn't going to class. I never had discipline, ever.

When I flunked out of school, I read Ben Franklin's autobiography . I saw how he lived his life and how structured and disciplined he was, and I started incorporating habits into my life. The first habit I formed was that I started reading 100 pages a day every day. I did that for years — even when I went back to school. I went back to the University of Georgia and ended up making straight As. Even during that time, I would read 100 pages every day on top of reading for school.

I started exercising and playing piano for an hour. And I did those things every single day for years, and then I got proficient at piano, I was in good shape, and I educated myself pretty intensely. But I think the most important thing that was happening during that time was that I was learning discipline. Not only did my habits improve me in many ways, but I also got very good at the skill of creating habits in my life.

So when Humans of New York came along, I knew taking a day off wasn't about the day of work that you lost, it was about breaking that habit. So no matter how I felt, no matter how insecure I was, no matter how lonely I was, no matter how sick I was, I went out and photographed every single day. For years and years and years, I posted four photos a day, every single day. And this is when Humans of New York was dovetailing with the rise of Facebook.

That discipline of posting and constantly putting it out allowed me to catch this wave that, in many ways, I'm still riding.

You've interviewed tens of thousands of people across 40 different countries. What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about the human experience?

I think the most interesting way to comment on this is what I've learned about life as it is lived versus life as it is depicted in the media. I think what happens when we're consuming media is that we don't necessarily recognize the incentives that are involved.

Ultimately, media is a storytelling business. Even very hard news media, you know? You want these stories to be factual but, ultimately, they're stories. What sells subscriptions and what gets people to watch are the stories.

Knowing that the media industry is driven by stories, then you have to ask yourself — What are the elements of a story that make it most marketable and successful? And what makes a good story is sex, violence, and all these kinds of extreme things. They're the same things that make a Hollywood movie good.

So what happens is that when you're consuming the world through media, you're seeing the world through a lens that highlights and skews toward those extremes.

When you have someone going into a country to tell a story, they need to tell a good story to sell newspapers, so they're looking for elements of life being lived that are filled with conflict or violence. What happens is that you get a lot of sensational stories about terrorism or crime.

You form an image of these places that is much more frightening and extreme than you'll find if you get on the ground. The way I describe it is that 99% of life being lived has nothing to do with politics or crime, yet that's all we read about in the media.

If you stop people one-on-one and ask them: "What are you thinking about all day long?" There's 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.

Even in countries like Iraq and Pakistan where all you hear coming out through the media is about the conflicts going on, still 99% of life being lived is inside the home and is much more intimate and relationship-driven.

Why are you so intrigued by the stories of regular people?

First of all, that was all that was available to me, you know? At first, it was just necessity. I'm a guy with a camera and no photography experience — you think *The New Yorker'*s going to hire me? I was a guy with a camera wanting to be a photographer with no credentials and no experience so I had to work with what was available to me.

First, it was just photographing who was on the street, then I started interviewing people on the street, and then I started learning stories from people on the street. I got very good at that out of necessity.

What it's grown into is realizing that the social media audience of Humans of New York is a lot larger than The New York Times, it's a lot larger than The New Yorker. It's realizing that not only the stories of ordinary people hold attention, they can be even more compelling and relatable than stories of public figures and celebrities.

It wasn't as a result of me realizing that the stories of ordinary people would be more compelling and then pursuing that path. It was looking for any path —  any path — and that was the only path available to me. In the course of getting very skilled at telling these stories, I realized that their inherent value was massive.

The photo of the Green Lady changed the trajectory of Humans of New York. Can you tell that story?

This is about six or seven months of just me eating, breathing, and sleeping and doing nothing but photographs. It was all I did, and it was starting to get a little bit of traction.

At the time, I was just getting photos of people, and occasionally, I'd be writing my own caption.

One day, I photographed this lady dressed all in green, and the next day I got sick and I couldn't go out and photograph. I was very disciplined at the time, so I had to put something on the blog, and I didn't have anything to post, but I had this picture of the Green Lady. It was a bad picture. I probably wouldn't have posted it otherwise because I really messed it up, but I decided to put it up anyway.

And then, I had remembered that she said something to me: "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." I was just like, "OK, I'll just put that little quote above the picture." And I did, and it was by far the most liked picture I had ever put up, which was only like 100 likes at the time.

It was a eureka moment because I realized that people were much more interested in learning about these people than they were in seeing these people.

It's been 10 years of maintaining a very large audience on the internet, which is very difficult to do. It's difficult to hold attention at all on the internet, especially for a sustained amount of time. Looking back on it, one thing that I've always done is that no matter how much I've committed to a path, when I feel the wind blowing a different direction, I'm willing to drop everything and follow that wind.

I'll give you an example. I had already signed a contract for my fourth book, which was going to be a book of the remote interviews I've been doing [during the pandemic]. I was going to make a book on that, and I'm working on it, and then Tanqueray happens .

[The Tanqueray series] is something I wasn't sure would work — telling a 12,000-word story on Instagram and Facebook. I've never seen anybody else do anything like it. Seeing how well it did work made me realize that the audience was engaging with this material in a very deep way. It caught my interest, and I was like, "I think we need to stop this next book, and we've got to figure out how to do a book on Tanqueray." And I don't know what that's going to be, but that's the way the wind is blowing right now.

No matter how great one path seems, when another path opens up, you need to immediately drop everything and go down that path. I've done it multiple times over the last 10 years. I think that's why the blog has existed as long as it has.

There's been some valid criticism written about Humans of New York. There's been no criticism that's written about Humans of New York that still applied two years later. The work has always been evolving, morphing, and changing so quickly that you can never pin it down.

You talk a lot about randomness and chance when selecting the people you photograph and the stories that you tell. But how do you go about choosing a certain person over the one sitting next to them?

Humans of New York two years ago was all random. The one variable that I needed most was always time. I tried to choose as wide of a selection of neighborhoods as possible, but the one thing I needed from everybody was time. These interview take time. A lot of times they take an hour and a half. They're pretty intense.

So I would normally be looking for somebody in a state of repose, maybe they're sitting on a bench or maybe they're leaning up against a wall smoking a cigarette. Beforehand it was time.

Now, my selection process involves an inbox full of 20,000 stories. My assistant has cut them down a little bit to give me a fighting chance.

The work has changed so much recently because it was totally focused on the interview. Now, [with people e-mailing in their stories], the interview is much less important because so much of the information is laid out there. So I'm looking at the story, and I'm judging it based on the characteristics and variables that I've learned through experience. It can't just be a compelling story, but it has to be a story that's compelling and will work in short-form. It has to fit in 2,200 characters, which is the character limit on an Instagram caption.

You might have an hour-long conversation with someone. How do you decide which story or quote best represents them in that particular moment in time?

It's all contextual. Every interview's different. I don't ever have a list of questions.

The street interviews are a lot different than the remote interviews because the street interviews always start from zero, where I'm trying to identify the events and conflicts in their lives upon which I can build a story around. Normally, I'll let them lead the interview.

A lot of times I'll ask, "What's your biggest challenge right now?" or "What's the biggest challenge that you've overcome?" Chances are that the biggest challenge they've overcome is the thing that has formed them the most and the thing they've spent the most time thinking about. So not only is it going to be the story that's most impactful and material to their life, but it's also going to be the story that's given them the most perspective and insight into the world.

Everyone's an expert in their particular problem because that's what we think about the most. And everybody has a very distinct struggle in their life that they've been forced to compensate for and create solutions for. It's given them a very unique perspective on the world formed by that struggle.

If you can find what that person's struggling with, you can often find the one thing that they can speak to with more wisdom than anybody else.

You write: "Truth is often spoken haltingly. With pauses. Like it's being dug up, one spoonful at a time, from somewhere deep." How does it feel to be on the receiving end of someone's heavy truth?

People often ask me, "How do you listen to these sad stories over and over again without being affected?" I've done series in pediatric cancer wards and I've done series where I spent weeks with refugees, but I think there's something about a really good interview that's about the exchange. It's not just directed one-way, where you're asking questions and you're getting answers.

I think confronting a person on a very deep level and pushing them on things that other people don't push them on gives them the respect of listening very intently. Challenging somebody is a form of respect because it shows that you're listening so closely that you're noticing inconsistencies in their story.

So you're pushing them on it and you're pushing them to explain — not just to you but to themselves — why they've been holding this belief and why they've been thinking that. When you come from a place of such deep listening, there's no question that you can ask that's too private, too confrontational, or too personal because they can sense it's coming from this authentic place of pure curiosity and pure interest as opposed to asking these questions as a means to an end.

That place doesn't get reached in every interview, but it gets reached in every interview that makes it on the blog. There's something about knowing that I am benefiting from hearing this story and this person's also benefiting from telling this story. More often than not, at the end of the interview, both of us are thanking each other. I'm thanking them for telling the story, and they're thanking me for listening.

No matter how sad the story is, you feel like it was a very healthy thing for both people involved, and that's a good feeling.

And that's how a lot of the people who read the blog also feel, right?

And that's the interesting part of it. For me, when the conversation is over, so much of the magic has already happened. It's in the moment. It's on the street. It's these moments where you're going to places in somebody's mind with them for the first time, and it's good for them, and you're there watching it. It's a powerful thing, especially when it's something someone's been avoiding confronting for a long time. It's a magical thing.

The success of Humans of New York has been about translating the magic of what happens on the street in the one-on-one interview to the blog. But the magic's over before I even start typing, you know what I mean?

It's about re-constructing [the interview] in a way that maintains the person's voice and intent, while the photograph maintains their emotion. I like to capture people while they're talking because I want the audience to be there and feel what it's like to sit and listen to that person. The better I've gotten over the years, the more impactful the work has become.

Tell me about what sparked your friendship with Tanqueray , whose story captivated the nation. How did it all start?

That all started very organically. What was so interesting about it is that I've had thousands and thousands of conversations with random people on the street. Almost all of those have been within the framework of doing my work — I carry around my camera and I very systematically interact with random people.

I have to approach a certain amount of people every single day — a certain percentage of those people will say "no," a certain percentage of those people will allow me to do an interview, and a certain percentage of the interviews will be "usable." I classify a "usable interview" as one where the person felt comfortable enough to be honest. It's not about a person being interesting or not interesting. It's about their comfort level with the process.

Anyway, it's a system, and that's how I meet all the amazing people that I meet and have all these amazing conversations. What was interesting about Tanqueray is that I wasn't in that framework. I was coming back from the gym, I didn't have my camera with me, and I was soaking wet with sweat. It was one of those things where I didn't want to put on a sweater after I hopped off the treadmill. I just wanted to go home and take a shower. Even though it was really cold outside, I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt because it wasn't that far of a walk.

When I see her, she's got this huge fur coat. One thing I do is when I see someone who is of a certain generation that has put a lot of effort into their style, I make sure to tell them they look great. She looked exquisite.

I told her, "Hey, you look great," and she called me over and said, "Let me ask you something — why is it that you white boys always shorts in the winter?"

So that's what got me and her talking, and right away, she launched into all these stories. She asked me where I lived, and I pointed, "Right there." She then said, "Oh, that house used to be full of hookers." She spoke for 10 minutes before I ever got a word in. I think most people would be looking at their watch being like, "Oh my gosh, I've got to go somewhere." But being who I am and what my job is, I was like, "Oh man, this woman can tell some stories. This is crazy."

She will go for 60 minutes without taking a breath, so after 15 minutes, I said, "Can you just wait here? I can't explain it really but I run a website and I take pictures of people and tell their stories. Can I run home and get my camera and do a little interview with you?"

I got back, and she was still there. Humans of New York meant nothing to her until she started getting stopped on the street a couple of days later after I shared her post . So that began it all.

There was this frenzy after I posted her story. All these people wanted to make a television series or a movie out of it, but she wanted to work with me. She's a very smart woman, and she didn't need to see numbers on social media to know that something that this guy did had 50 people stopping her on the street in the course of an hour. That's what she got in her mind even though she probably still doesn't fully understand Humans of New York. That's her street smarts.

She took a few television and movie meetings, and at some point, I was thinking like, "This could be the best story I have the opportunity to tell. Why give it to somebody else? This is what I do." So we decided to make a podcast together. It was going to be a first-person podcast, and she was going to do it in her own voice.

That was our plan, and we did it for months and months. We met and did tons of interviews, and that's when her health took a turn for the worst, so I was like, "We can't wait. She needs help now." So I quickly re-tooled everything for the blog, which involved cutting out 60% of wild stuff, and that's how we got here today.

Tanqueray’s story was full of twists and turns and pain and struggle, but there was no regret. Why do you think it's easier for people to empathize with the pain more than the joy?

We connect much more to each other's pains than we do our successes. You look at social media, and it's a lot of people bragging about what they have.

A lot of the underlying energy is, "Look at what I'm achieving. Look at what I have. Look at what I've experienced that you don't have." And that is a separating energy. When someone is saying, "Look what I'm going through," that is a connective energy.

The one most singular emotion is pain. It's the one that can't be divided. It can't be split. There's all different types of happiness and peace and contentment, but pain is pain and hurt is hurt.

Even though it's got a hundred million different masks and faces, underneath it is the singular feeling of pain that people know. To really identify with somebody and have compassionate empathy for them is to identify pain in others — the same pain that you've felt even though it might not have the same causes.

I think that is why the story of other people's struggles and the story of Tanqueray's struggles, in particular, tapped in to such a nerve. To really know pain in other people is to know yourself in them.

Tanqueray's life story would’ve gone undocumented if it wasn't for a total stranger's curiosity and willingness to listen. I bet there are wildly interesting stories that exist within our own families. Why do you think so few of us take the time to ask?

Remember that my interviews are within the structure of my work.

My own wife says, "Maybe you should be asking me [those questions]." There's something about intimacy — something about being really close to somebody — that makes these difficult conversations tougher to have. I'm going to figure it out one day...I've been thinking about it a lot.

Why is it so much harder for me to ask my mom and my wife and my brother these questions that I ask of a complete stranger? On the flip side, why is it so much easier for a complete stranger to tell me these things than it would be for them to tell their mom or their brother or their sister?

I'm going to figure it out one day, but my thinking so far is that relationships are tough. It's really hard to make a close relationship work. You get to a place where everything is working, the ship is sailing along, and you become really afraid of introducing new truths and new information that is going to change that dynamic and throw it off course.

There's something about intimacy, something about the proximity you have to another person, that makes these searing questions so much harder to ask than if you don't know them at all. And on the flip side, they're so much easier to answer if you don't know the person asking them at all.

That is the strange power and strange wrinkle in the universe that fuels my work. I'm yet to fully understand the mechanisms behind why it works.

You've spent the last 10 years telling everyone else's story. What's the one thing about your story that you wish everyone knew?

No. I wish people knew none of it! I've always wanted Humans of New York to be bigger than I am.

Because it's better than me. It's more pure than me. It makes more of a difference in people's lives than I do as a concept. The more I can disappear with my own human weaknesses, inconsistencies, bad opinions and bad thinking, the stronger the work can become because it's not tethered to me.

So much of social media is personality-driven. All of it is! And Humans of New York is not at all. My personality is not in there at all. I think so much of its success is because of that.

I am the most comfortable — and I think the work is the best — the least visible I am. I always wonder what the right balance of it is because I think to myself, "Maybe I'd like to do something as Brandon Stanton one day, but I've been hiding Brandon Stanton as much as I possibly can." I question the wisdom of that sometime. But ultimately, in my quiet moments, I come back to: "The more you disappear, the better things are."

I'm most comfortable when I'm working with someone to be a channel and vessel for their story.

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Humans of New York and the Cavalier Consumption of Others

The most famous photograph from Brandon Stanton’s new book, “Humans of New York: Stories”—the one you have probably seen or read about or heard discussed—is of a boy in an open black bubble jacket. Beneath the jacket is a fleece-lined hoodie, also black, and in his hand the boy holds a black plastic bag, stretched by the weight of what might be groceries. The sidewalk behind him is cracked and dotted with litter. Dull-brown public-housing towers—as much a part of the quintessential visual New York as the bodega bag—form a jagged horizon.

You might know that this boy’s name is Vidal, and that he attends the Mott Hall Bridges Academy, in Brownsville, and that images of him, the first of which was accompanied by the somewhat noirish details of his still-short experience (“When I was nine, I saw a guy get pushed off the roof of that building right there,” he says), became widely shared sensations on Stanton’s Humans of New York blog and its attendant social-media channels earlier this year. The world learned that the most influential person in Vidal’s life was Nadia Lopez, his principal at Mott Hall, and, after subsequent HONY posts featuring Lopez, marvelled at her admirable devotion, amid the imagined grayscale of still-ungentrified Brooklyn, to boosting the spirits, and lifting the ambitions, of her students. Sensing an uncommon interest in Vidal among his audience, Stanton launched a fund-raising campaign that yielded an eventual $1.4 million for the school. In February, as a coda, Vidal and Lopez met President Obama, in the Oval Office. In Stanton’s photo of the encounter, Vidal sits grinning behind the Resolute desk, the President and principal flanking him like wings.

This series of events—Vidal’s travel, in the reckoning of HONY ’s devotees, from photograph to popular phenomenon—is in many ways a perfect realization of the ethos of “Stories,” which recently débuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-sellers list. In his introduction to the book, which doubles as a statement of purpose for HONY now and into the future, Stanton describes the process by which the project “evolved from a photography blog to a storytelling blog.” (Stanton, who grew up in Georgia and briefly worked as a bond trader, started Humans of New York almost immediately after arriving in New York City, for the first time, in his mid-twenties.) The short and notionally revealing quotes that accompany each image “grew longer and longer,” Stanton explains, “until eventually I was spending fifteen to twenty minutes interviewing each person I photographed. … The blog became dedicated to telling the stories of strangers on the street.” “Stories,” then, is an effort to mirror “the in-depth storytelling that the blog is known for today.”

In this way, HONY joins organizations like TED and the Moth at the vanguard of a slow but certain lexical refashioning. Once an arrangement of events, real or invented, organized with the intent of placing a dagger—artistic, intellectual, moral—between the ribs of a listener or reader, a story has lately become a glossier, less thrilling thing: a burst of pathos, a revelation without a veil to pull away. “Storytelling,” in this parlance, is best employed in the service of illuminating business principles, or selling tickets to non-profit galas, or winning contests.

Photography has long been used instrumentally, if not to tell stories in this contemporary sense, certainly to call attention to various social realities. The reformist journalist Jacob Riis, for example, used photographs—collected in books like “How the Other Half Lives”—to uncover the squalor of late-nineteenth-century tenement life on the Lower East Side, along the way becoming an innovator in the use of flash photography. But, rather than pithy quotes or even harrowing anecdotes, the accompanying writing was deep and skillfully rendered reportage, connected chiefly by implication to the pictures Riis had taken. Thus occupying the vague space between archetype and anecdote, between the particular and the more broadly illustrative, Riis’s photos realized photography’s unique and enduring possibility—to serve artistic and documentary ends at once.

This is how, when observing a photograph of three children asleep on the street , we experience a kind of moral-aesthetic double vision: we feel the injustice and brutality of the thing itself, for these three and others facing a similar plight, and, at the same time, marvel at Riis’s ability to mythologize them, making each an avatar of bravery, of camaraderie, of love.

It might be instructive to consider Stanton’s photo of Vidal along similar lines, sans story. Forget, for a moment, the factual details that we have gathered in the course of knowing-but-not-really-knowing him: the aerial murder; the school so suddenly flush; the audience with the leader of the free world. Forget his name, even. Consider, instead, the ease of the boy’s sneakers against the sidewalk; his shy, smirking confidence; the preternatural calm with which he occupies the space within the frame. Viewed like this—as, yes, irrefutably real, but also as a readable image—he is reminiscent of Gordon Parks’s squinting Harlem newsboy . Both convey something almost spiritual: something about the delicate string that hangs between youth and resilience, about the miraculous talent of children, however voiceless, to stand unswallowed by the city.

During the throes of the Great Depression, the novelist Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White travelled together through the rural South, hoping to gather impressions from the lives of black and white tenant farmers. The resulting book, “You Have Seen Their Faces,” might be read as a direct ancestor to HONY : each of Bourke-White’s photographs is a melodrama in black and white, adorned with an illustrative caption. A barefoot black boy in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, stands surrounded by newsprint-papered walls, a dog at his feet. “Blackie ain’t good for nothing,” the caption says. “He’s just an old hound dog.” A white man, jowly, with round glasses, gazes skyward: “Beat a dog and he’ll obey you. They say it’s the same way with the blacks.”

Like Riis, Caldwell and Bourke-White had explicitly political reasons for undertaking their project, involving the periodically necessary task of introducing America to itself. Hence the grammar of the title: You , presumably a Northern, urban liberal, well-meaning but essentially ignorant of the lives of your poor southerly neighbors, are now invited to partake in Their hardships. And—again, as with Riis—this acquaintance is earned by way of more than pictures and homespun snippets: the pages of “You Have Seen Their Faces” are split almost evenly between text and image; Caldwell goes on at length, magisterial and morally devastated at turns, providing a real accounting of American exploitation, and of its casualties. It is not, Bourke-White and Caldwell seem to say, enough simply to see the faces of one’s destitute countrymen. Instead, the collision of photograph and paragraph requires a constant movement between broad themes and searing details, between sentiment and cold fact.

“You Have Seen Their Faces” presents the challenge of knowing other people as possible, if only gradually, and after an acknowledgement of social and racial distances. Another hybrid text of the era, James Agee and Walker Evans’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” regards the entire enterprise with something like despair. To the extent that “Famous Men” has an overriding agenda, it is to arrive at a sense of the dignity—or, perhaps, even more simply, the reality—of others, despite the stubborn mystery of their circumstances. This might explain the vast expanse of interpretive space between the book’s images and text: Evans’s photos sit alone at the front of the book, unremarked upon, serving as a kind of tonal prelude, then cede the stage completely to Agee’s wild, modernistic jumble of verse, prose, and theatric convention. If there are connections to be made between the photos and the words, they are left untraced, leaving crucial labor to be done by readers—involving and implicating them in an important, if impossible, process of discovery.

Agee is at times almost mischievous in his illustration of the unknowability of other people and their problems—and the moral quandary involved in trying to uncover them anyway. In his listing of the dramatis personae in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” he catalogues himself and Walker ruefully:

JAMES AGEE: a spy, traveling as a journalist. WALKER EVANS: a counter-spy, traveling as a photographer.

By comparison, “Stories” betrays shallow notions of truth (achievable by dialogic cut-and-paste) and egalitarianism. Both come too easily. Instead of the difference acknowledged by Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You and Their , Stanton’s all-encompassing title implies a vague, flattening humanism, too quick to forget the barriers erected—even here, and now, in New York—against real equality. (Stanton has lately taken his project farther afield as well, to India, Pakistan, Iran.) The money for Mott Hall Bridges Academy makes us feel good—and why not?—but there are many other schools, and they are part of the same unequal system.

The quick and cavalier consumption of others has something to do with Facebook, Humans of New York’s native and most comfortable medium. The humans in Stanton’s photos—just like the most photogenic and happy-seeming and apparently knowable humans in your timeline—are well and softly lit, almost laminated; the city recedes behind them in a still-recognizable blur. 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. Any ambiguity or intrigue to be found in a HONY photo is chased out into the open, and, ultimately, annihilated by Stanton’s captions, and by the satisfaction that he seems to want his followers to feel.

One of the great joys, after all, of looking at a portrait is the imperfectible act of reading a face. Is that a smile or a leer? Anguish or insight? Focus or fear? “Stories” offers answers before the questions have a chance to settle. The pursed, passing smile of a young woman in what looks like Union Square is made, by force, to correspond to the recent death of her sister. The downward glance of a snow-besieged redhead can only be understood as having to do with the fiancé she lost to the war in Iraq. The dirt-tanned wrist of a beggar, very obviously slit and scabbing over, can’t be trusted to do its own work. “Everything I knew has been washed out into the water,” the man says, speaking of his chronic brain damage. “I’ve tried to commit suicide several times.”

The best hints in “Stories” of actual life in New York come despite Stanton’s stage directions. A pair of kids, two hundred pages apart, wear identical orange ties and blue sweaters, testimony to the growing power, even sartorial, of Eva Moskowitz, the C.E.O. of Success Academy. A man in a rare uncaptioned photo sleeps on a subway platform, splayed out like a starfish, performing that most basic of urban imperatives: claiming space. Olmsted and Vaux haunt the proceedings via walls, walkways, treescapes. Robert Moses peeks out from the project windows behind Vidal. That these details—secondary, at best, to the stated purposes of “Stories”—survive, and manage to give the book a hidden, beautiful core, is a sign of Stanton’s real (and clearly growing) ability as a portraitist and poser of people. It also confirms a fact that seems to escape Stanton: that the truest thing about a person, that person’s real story, is just as often the thing withheld—the silent thing—as the thing offered.

The most interesting people in “Stories”—and by this one might only mean the best New Yorkers—are the conscientious objectors. Happy to relinquish their likenesses, they refuse further flattening. One woman—a book open on her lap, a swatch of a purple sweater waving out over washed-out jeans, her face perhaps pointedly outside the frame—says only this to her would-be inquisitor: “These experiences were so meaningful to me that I don’t want you to soundbite them.”

Someone with wild eyes for an entire face, bemaned by equally crazed polar-white hair: “You’re going to misconstrue what I say.”

And here: a man in a motorized chair with his mouth wide open, holding a bunch of huge, inexplicable technicolor balloons.

“I’m Hustle Man,” he says. “That’s all you need to know.”

Ming Thein | Photographer

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Photoessay: Humans of New York

Few cities I’ve visited can compete with NYC on the basis of diversity…and then there’s that extra layer of intensity and motion which Tokyo and Hong Kong perhaps match, but don’t do so with the kind of density and spread of New York. It’s always amazed me that there’s such a wide variety of stages possible in a layout of grid streets – I can’t think of anywhere else that offers a hunting ground this rich for the social observer. I was only here for a week, shot infrequently, and still managed to come away with interesting images. MT

This series was shot with a Nikon Z7 and my custom JPEG picture controls , and a Fuji XF10 and Photoshop Workflow III .

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Back to the FX10 for a moment…did that subway shot require a major massage in processing to correct color? Or did the Fuji produce all those varied skin tones (which look amazingly authentic) on its own, despite the interior lighting?

Does the once-enjoyed-but-now-rationalized category in your gear list mean disposed of?

Just eyedropper WB of the raw file.

Yes, that means disposed of. I had a colleague who really wanted it, and it’s been largely replaced by the iPhone 11 Pro (not for overall quality, but convenience for social situations).

What a great portfolio Ming! You just keep getting better and better!!

Thanks Roger, hope you’re keeping well!

Some really excellent shots Ming, particularly the last four verticals. Take care

Masterful use of the XF10, as always. It keeps calling to me…but I’m not fool enough to think I could achieve the same results.

Thanks – I didn’t do anything special here, though…

Lovely shots! As someone who lives and works in NYC I can attest to the fact that the density of people is a never-ending joy to shoot. However all of those humans can be a bit less entertaining when you have to live with them all on a daily basis 🙂

How do you find color matching between the XF10 and the Nikon system? I’ve been looking for replacement for my Coolpix A, but hated trying to match those whacky Fuji colors in the past…. I could deal with the frustrating lack of built in lens shutter if the images hold up to the rest of my shots.

I wonder if you ever get immune to it, actually – in the same way somebody living in an otherwise relatively exotic location gets immune to their surroundings.

The XF10 is better than other Fujis as it uses a normal Bayer sensor 🙂

Splendide !!!

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UPDATE 29/12/2021: Z7 PROFILES ALSO COMPATIBLE WITH THE NEW Z9.  

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• November 13, 2017

Humans of New York as a Life Narrative

Hi everyone, today I will be discussing the popular photo blog Humans of New York in terms of its purpose, intended audience and the extent to which it can be considered a life narrative. HONY was originally started by Brandon Stanton as a photography project that displayed photographs of 10,000 New Yorkers, articulating the diverse population found in New York City (Stanton, Brandon). The project later expanded to incorporate quotes and personal stories of the photographed individuals, generating an international following of 20 million people on different social media platforms including Instagram and Facebook (Stanton, Brandon). Similarly, their slogan of  “NYC – One Story at a Time” conveys their intent to deconstruct the broad identity of a city or culture by focussing on the individuals that it consists of (Stanton, Brandon). HONY maintains a primary focus on events of trauma or tragedy experienced by people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, eliminating the social status of the individuals it features therefore representing all human experiences as equal.

Humans of New York targets a primarily western audience that engages in social media. Their effort to address this audience can be seen through the organisation of their posts into ‘Countries’ and ‘Series.’ The subcategories that fall under each of these titles are not experiences ordinarily held by their target audience, revealing the goal of HONY to educate their audience and evoke an emotional response. The series titles that are currently featured include, Invisible Wounds, Paediatric Cancer, Inmate Stories, Syrian Americans and Refugee Stories (Stanton, Brandon). By addressing these current public issues through this type of format, HONY is able to demonstrate their effect on individual lives. This method works as an appeal to pathos by evoking an emotional response in a public that has become desensitised due to the constant statistical representation of trauma. Similarly, HONY focus’ on the individual experiences of people living in less economically developed countries such as Pakistan, Iraq and South Sudan (Stanton, Brandon). By providing individual life narratives and voices to a culture that has been overlooked or generalised in the western world, HONY reminds its readers of the universality of human nature and human experience. In this way, the struggles and hardships faced by people in a context that seems foreign in the mainstream media suddenly appears more relevant and relatable to western readers.

I think that Humans of New York can be considered a form of life narrative as it describes a pivotal life event and the impact that it has had on an individual. As each of the posts are presented in quotation marks, the story is represented as a direct transcript of what the person photographed has shared. This is important as it ensures that the story is free from the third party bias that HONY would impose through their retelling of the story. However, due to the length of each post, they do not provide much background information or context in the way that most life narratives do. In this way, they behave as ‘snapshots’ into people’s lives that are carefully selected to contribute to the overall image of HONY.

Works Cited:

Stanton, Brandon. Humans of New York , www.humansofnewyork.com.

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The “Humans of New York” Photo Project Becomes a 13-Part Video Documentary Series: Watch It Free Online

in Books , Creativity , Film , Life , Photography , Travel | December 1st, 2017 Leave a Comment

Fol­low­ing sev­er­al books and  a UN-spon­sored world tour to doc­u­ment humans in over twen­ty coun­tries, the project has mor­phed into a 13-episode docu-series as part of Facebook’s orig­i­nal video con­tent plat­form.

Aid­ed by cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Michael Crom­mett , Stan­ton elic­its his cus­tom­ary blend of uni­ver­sal and spe­cif­ic truths from his inter­view sub­jects. Extend­ing the moment into the video realm affords view­ers a larg­er win­dow onto the com­plex­i­ties of each human’s sit­u­a­tion.

Take episode four, “Rela­tion­ships,” above:

An ample, unadorned woman in late-mid­dle age recalls being swept off her feet by a pas­sion that still burns bright…

An NYU grad stares uncom­fort­ably in her pur­ple cap and gown as her divorced par­ents air var­i­ous regrets…

A cou­ple with mis­matched views on mar­riage are upstaged by a spon­ta­neous pro­pos­al unfold­ing a few feet away…

La Vie en Rose holds deep mean­ing for two cou­ples, despite rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent loca­tions, pre­sen­ta­tions, and ori­en­ta­tions.

A lit­tle girl has no prob­lem call­ing the shots around her spe­cial fel­la…

I love you, New York!!!

Oth­er themes include Mon­ey, Time, Pur­pose, and Par­ent­ing.

One of the great plea­sures of both series and blog is Stanton’s open-mind­ed­ness as to what con­sti­tutes New York and New York­ers.

Some inter­views take place near such tourist-friend­ly locales as Bethes­da Foun­tain and the Wash­ing­ton Square Arch, but just as many tran­spire along­side notice­ably Out­er Bor­ough archi­tec­ture or the blast­ed cement heaths apron­ing its less sought after pub­lic schools.

Those who live here will nod with recog­ni­tion at the cher­ry blos­som self­ies, “show­time” in the sub­way , and the Bush­wick vibe of the groom who pro­posed to his bride at Coney Island, under the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eat­ing Con­test Wall of Fame .

Dit­to the appear­ance of such local celebri­ties as Jim­my Webb , emer­i­tus man­ag­er of the punk bou­tique, Trash and Vaude­ville and  Black­wolf the Drag­on­mas­ter , the city’s unof­fi­cial wiz­ard.

Below, Stan­ton explains his goal when con­duct­ing inter­views and demon­strates how a non-threat­en­ing approach can soft­en strangers to the point of can­dor.

It’s well know ’round these parts that  cer­tain seg­ments of the local pop­u­lace would gnaw off limbs to be immor­tal­ized by Stan­ton , but he cleaves to the pure serendip­i­ty of his selec­tion process. Ask­ing to have your pic­ture tak­en ensures that it won’t be. Luck puts you in front of his lens. Shar­ing your truth is what makes you human.

Watch  Humans of New York: The Series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Humans of New York: Street Pho­tog­ra­phy as a Cel­e­bra­tion of Life

Inter­act with The New York Times Four-Part Doc­u­men­tary, “A Short His­to­ry of the High­rise”

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.) 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday .

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The New York Times

The learning network | skills and strategies | photo projects inspired by ‘humans of new york’.

Skills and Strategies | Photo Projects Inspired by ‘Humans of New York’

Academic Skills

Teaching Ideas Based on New York Times Content.

• See All in Academic Skills »
• See All Lesson Plans »

Do your students follow Humans of New York ?

The site and the related Tumblr and Facebook page created by the amateur photographer Brandon Stanton have millions of followers, and the “Humans of New York” book, published in October, landed in the No. 1 spot on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list its first week on sale.

As the Times article about the phenomenon puts it:

Mr. Stanton — a hybrid of interviewer, photographer and eager chronicler of street life — said this week that he was still stunned by the runaway success of his book, which has more than 145,000 copies in print. “It seemed like a stupid idea, just taking pictures of people on the street,” he said. “But there’s a comfort, an affirmation, a validation in being exposed to people with similar problems.” Mr. Stanton is a 29-year-old Georgia native with no training as a journalist. He has owned two cameras in his life and admits he has never learned the technically correct way to use them. When he moved to New York in 2010, he was friendless, nearly broke and recently relieved of his job as a bond trader in Chicago. In the three years since, he has transformed himself into a recognizable face (who is approached by fans several times a day) with a healthy income unusual for a young, inexperienced photographer.

In this lesson, students read the article, analyze some of Mr. Stanton’s work, and dream up their own projects inspired by it.

Your Task: Read an article about Humans of New York and analyze photos from the project. For extra credit, plan and execute your own Humans of New York-inspired piece.

• Read “A Fisherman in New York’s Sea of Faces.” As you read, you may want note your response on our One-Pager (PDF) handout.
• After reading, turn and talk to a partner. Using what you have learned from the article, why do you think so many people have connected with Brandon Stanton’s work?
• Then, take a look at some of the photos from Humans of New York (Teachers, be sure to preview the site for your students). Visit the archive and click on any of the individual images to see larger versions and to read the accompanying interviews.
• Choose a photo or two to write about. What about each image got your attention? In detail, describe what you see going on in the picture ? How did the caption work with the image?
• What about this project over all interests you most? What kind of project could you do that has some of the same goals or uses some of the same techniques?

Before You Do the Task You Might …

• Use the three questions The Learning Network uses for its photo analysis feature : What’s going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find? Or, use this picture-analysis guide from the National Archives (PDF) to think about each image.
• After analyzing the question and the caption provided by Brandon Stanton, what questions do you have? What would you like to say to the subject of the photograph if you could? Why?

After You’ve Finished:

There are many other projects out there inspired by Brandon Stanton. Browse a few to brainstorm a project of your own:

• Humans of Syracuse
• Humans of Jerusalem
• Humans of Nubia
• Souls of San Francisco

You might also take a look at a few more modest projects inspired by Humans of New York at high schools all over . Here are some created by students in Sarah Gross’s district:

• Humans of Biotech: Three students at Biotechnology High School in Freehold, N.J., chronicle the humans found in the hallways of their school.
• Humans of High Tech: A student at High Technology High School is determined to learn more about her peers before graduation.
• 14 Strangers: A student at Biotechnology High School, inspired by a TED talk by Cesar Kuriyama about Mr. Kuriyama’s One Second Every Day project, chronicles his own experience interviewing a random person each day.

Above and Beyond:

Feeling inspired? Try your hand at a Humans of New York miniproject. Look around your home, your school, or someplace in your community where people gather. It might even be in your classroom or your school. If you could ask those people one question, what would it be?

Or, if doing this for a curriculum-related project, your teacher might suggest questions related to the real-world implications of a topic you’re studying. For instance, you might do a Humans of New York-style project around a topic like immigration , climate change or bullying that affects people locally as well as globally.

Approach your subjects respectfully and ask if you may take a photo and if they would be willing to speak to you briefly. Mr. Stanton asks people “about their lives, their struggles, their disappointments and their hopes” but, as the article indicates, people did not open up to him right away. Begin with gentle questions, and be sure to tell your subjects you plan to use the photos in a project, so they can choose whether or not to participate. Write down each person’s answers or record them as they speak, but make sure you ask for permission first.

Then, share your photo and a caption gleaned from the conversation. The caption should attempt to capture the essence, or most important part, of the conversation you had, but should use your subject’s exact words.

Finally, showcase your work by creating anything from a physical bulletin board in your classroom, a poster, a blog or Facebook page — in collaboration with your classmates or alone.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Photography has been a passion for me for a while now, and to be honest, after looking at Brandon Stanton’s blog, I was tremendously inspired to carry on. While one side may argue that photography is all about skills, I would like to say that it’s about perspective. If I was to ask someone- what’s your perspective, the following question would be- perspective on what? Well, that’s what photography is about. Two people can capture the same blue sky, and they might have totally different opinion about what they see, or what they feel, or their focus maybe completely different too.. Brandon Stanton’s work combines what he sees, and what the photographed person feels. I believe a combination such as that is truly magnificent. We photograph a subject to hold memories. But those memories may trigger one emotion right at the moment, and a different emotion a year from now. So our perspective will be changed. But what will not change is what made us capture the image, or made us feel that the moment is significant enough to hold on to. In Brandon Stanton’s work, we notice something indescribably magnificent about every person who is photographed, and I would like to believe that’s what makes his work so special. I have done a project Like the Humans of New York over the summer. I came to a realization that he is not continuing this project for recognition, or fame. He is doing it because it’s enjoyable. It truly is a way to get to know someone better, or to see a side of a person that is not quite noticeable in daily life. It’s surprising how much significance just a project or a picture can hold.

What's Next

Old News, Vintage Photos & Nostalgic Stories

Humans of the bygone era -photo essay show new yorkers from the victorian era ….

• Strangeness

In 1896, Alice Austen (1866-1952) documented everyday life on the streets of New York City by wandering around and snapping photographs of ordinary people with her camera. She took photos of the street sweepers, cab drivers, police officers, postal workers, organ grinders, newspaper girls and boys, and several different vendors selling various products.

Alice became fascinated with photography when her uncle Oswald brought home a camera when she was around ten years old. Another uncle, Peter Austen, a chemistry professor at Rutgers, taught her to process the photographs.

Austen’s primary subject was the daily life of the people of New York City. Her photos portrayed lower-class citizens living in New York’s Lower East Side, and upper middle-class society on Staten Island.

The earliest surviving photograph taken by her is dated 1884. Over the next 40 years, she produced approximately 8,000 photographs. She took many photos of immigrants that perfectly portrayed their moments of anxious hesitation and bemused curiosity.

Alice met Gertrude Amelia Tate (1871–1962) in 1899. Tate was from Brooklyn, New York, and was employed as a dance instructor and a teacher for kindergarten children. Gertrude was a regular visitor to Staten Island to see Alice, and they often vacationed in Europe together.

She moved in with Alice in 1917 and became her companion for life, despite her family’s concerns about the relationship.

Alice made ends meet with the interest from an inheritance left by her grandfather, but the money all vanished in 1929 on Black Tuesday during the Wall Street Crash. By age 63, she was penniless and began selling her furniture, artworks, and silver so that she could buy groceries and fuel. She then had to refinance her house, but because she was unable to make the payments, the house was repossessed by the bank in 1945. Her remaining possessions were sold to a second-hand dealer from New Jersey for the paltry sum of six hundred dollars.

Continues below

Alice called her friend from the Staten Island Historical Society, Loring McMillen, to come and pick up her photos. He stored them in the Third County Courthouse archives in Richmondtown. She moved around a bit and then finally entered a nursing home.

She declared bankruptcy on June 24, 1950, and was admitted to Staten Island’s poorhouse, the New York City Farm Colony.

In 1950, the publishing company Picture Press contacted C. Copes Brinley of the Staten Island Historical Society about unpublished photographs for a project they were doing concerning the history of American women.

Of the roughly 8,000 pictures she took, the archives had 3,500 undocumented Austen plate negatives.

Constance Robert, a young researcher, met with Brinley and McMillen in October 1950 to have a look at the images. Oliver Jensen, a staff member of Life magazine, went to view the photos on the next trip and published several of the photos in his book The Revolt of American Women .

Jensen wrote an eight-page story about Austen in Life magazine and also published six pages of the travel photos in Holiday Magazine.

The proceeds from these publications amounted to more than $4,000 for Alice Austen’s share, and she was able to leave the Farm Colony and take a room in a private nursing home. She was the guest of honor on October 9, 1951, at the first Alice Austen Day, which featured an exhibition of her photographs.

Read another story from us: Victorians at the beach and the bizarre device called the “Bathing Machine”

To all of the guests that were there, she said that she was so glad that what once pleased her so much has now turned out to be a pleasure for so many other people.

Humans of Our School

Adapting "humans of new york" to help students learn about their communities, overview and context.

This lesson is aimed at grades 4-6, and will promote student research and learning about their community through the principles of listening and questioning.  Students will apply these principles to an interview of one of their school’s staff members and use writing skills to tell the story they uncover.  Some of these lessons may be one day lessons, but several of them will take multiple days or even a week.

Students will be assessed through the attached rubric as well as through their Google Slides presentation.

Resources and Materials

• Humans of New York book and/or Humans of New York website
• Rubric (Google Doc) 
• Camera or cell phone
• Laptop or other way to use the internet
• Google Slides

A Step-by-Step Plan for Teaching Narrative Writing from Cult of Pedagogy : Author Jennifer Gonzalez shares the process she used to teach narrative writing to middle school students.

The Best of Humans of New York

Full Frame Essay: Humans of New York – A Global Community Connecting through Photographs

Step-by-Step Instructional Plan

Lesson 1: overview: why are we doing this.

This lesson is focused on learning about our school community and building connections between students and staff through shared experiences and storytelling. Students will learn how to conduct an interview, take photos that show emotions and write a narrative based on their interview.

Students will be given a general overview of the purpose of the lesson, which are:

• To form connections between students and staff.
• To learn interview techniques such as broad questions, listening, paraphrasing, and follow-up questions.
• To identify emotions the speaker is showing and capture these feelings in photographic form.
• To collaborate with a partner.
• To write a narrative based on the interview.
• To create a Google Slide presentation with pictures and story of interview subject.

Lesson 2: Identifying Emotions

After students have been given an overview of the unit we will begin by reading several of Brandon’s photo blogs. We will identify emotions of the subjects in Brandon’s pictures and compare what we see in the pictures to the emotions we identify in the narrative.

Lesson 3: What makes a good interview question for this assignment?

Ask open ended questions that invite the interviewee to tell a story about his or her life. We will brainstorm questions. We will focus on shared experiences in our community, such as how the fires affect us, the river, the importance of salmon and water and native dances. We will also discuss questions that are more generalized to the human experience, such as childhood, holidays, pets, etc.

Lesson 4: Role play

With a partner, role play a situation that you would find yourself in as a Humans photographer. One person will be the subject, and the other will be the interviewer. Students will need to think about the following. How will you approach your subject? How long will your interaction take? What type of energy will you need to make the subject feel welcomed and open? What kind of follow up questions are needed (and when) in order to elicit more information and feelings from the interviewee.

Lesson 5: Preparing the script

Using the list of questions the class has brainstormed, students will create a script for approaching staff to interview for our Humans of our School project. The script will include an opening conversation starter and a question about whether they are comfortable allowing you to take their photo. (All staff will be approached by me ahead of time so that I know they are willing to be interviewed, and can help prompt students if they get stuck) A few thought-provoking questions (both positive and negative) will get your subject to share their story—lastly, a wrap-up statement thanking your subject for their time.

Lesson 6: Becoming a photographer

We will look through the photos in one of Brandon’s books to find a few key features that make his photos memorable. Throughout all of his books, the techniques he uses are crafted so that the reader can better connect with his subject while getting a feeling for the subject’s surroundings. When taking photos for this project, keep these ideas in mind.

Try Different Angles:

• First, it is essential to look at the use angles in all of Brandon’s photos. You will rarely see an image in which the subject sits/stands directly in front of the camera. The subject will typically be seen with a tilted head or an angled body.At certain angles, objects can also appear larger or smaller than reality. This is a fun way to change the context of the photo.
• The angle of the background is a crucial component of Brandon’s photos. You will notice that the subject will always appear perpendicular to the background so that the picture has depth.
• You will never see a photo of a subject standing in front of a wall or door. The depth of the images works in unison with the depth of content that the stories convey.

Fill the Frame with Your Subject

• Making the subject the highlight of your photo is key to a Humans photo. The subject should always be in the center of your frame or slightly off-center to keep balance.
• It is essential to balance the size of the subject with the surroundings. A good photograph needs balance. Try to limit objects that can distract the reader from the face. It is human nature for a reader to look at a person’s face in a picture immediately. Use this to your advantage.

Lesson 7: Writing an Effective Narrative

A narrative is a story told in the first-person point of view, which means the writer uses the word “I.” A narrative should begin with a topic sentence that introduces the subject matter and a specific thought or feeling the writer has. The middle part is called the body. The body is where you explain what happened in the story, usually chronologically. The body can include various components that may include details about the setting or conversations between characters. It is vital to include sensory details in the narrative story. The sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch you experienced during this period are essential to setting the scene. The narrative ends with a conclusion. A conclusion can include your thoughts or feelings on how the story made you feel emotional, discuss what you learned, wrap up the story, or provide a funny anecdote.

• Topic Sentence

Lesson 8: Finding Humanity

In the last assignment of this unit, we will explore the stories of the people that make up our school. Students will become a mini Brandon Stanton at our school to choose staff members to photograph and interview. Using the skills they have attained from this unit, their goal will be to create their very own human entry and make a Google Slide presentation about them. To start, they will need to seek out one or more staff members at our school, eventually sharing one of their stories in their presentation. It is important to have photography, interview, and note-taking skills to be successful.

Lesson 9: Creating a Google slide presentation

Student’s slide presentation will be a collaborative effort where groups are able to share the story of the staff member they interviewed.

Topics/tags:

Also recommended, "they carried us:" exploring our literacy roots and routes with joy and genius, place-based writing in action: opportunities for authentic writing in the world beyond the classroom, the marginal syllabus: (re)marking on equity in education.

See Images of New Yorkers and Their Pets Across Three Centuries

An upcoming exhibition will trace the history of the city’s domesticated dogs, cats, horses and other animals

Sonja Anderson

Daily Correspondent

Over the centuries, New York City’s swelling population has brought a proliferation of fauna: rats, pigeons—and puppies.

New York’s pet residents will soon be highlighted in a new exhibition by the New-York Historical Society . Debuting in Manhattan this fall, “ Pets and the City ” traces the history of animal domestication in New York, from the dogs trained by the Indigenous Lenape and Haudenosaunee peoples to the furry family members living in the city today.

“In New York City alone, it is estimated there are more than two million animal companions who reign over human hearts, homes and pocketbooks,” says Roberta J.M. Olson, the historical society’s curator of drawings, in a  statement . “Given that, it’s fascinating to explore how these creatures rose to such a place of distinction.”

Before European colonists arrived on the island of  Manahatta —now Manhattan—Indigenous groups lived in its “rolling hills and dense oak forests,” as Artnet ’s Richard Whiddington writes. Animals had a spiritual significance for many Indigenous groups, which trained and kept dogs as companions and assistant hunters.

Hunting was a vital component of dogs’ proliferation in the New World. Canines have been helping humans catch and kill animals for  millennia , and European settlers continued the tradition with dogs they  brought from across the Atlantic. Per the historical society, artistic depictions of hunting dogs—including paper dolls—show how important they were to 18th-century settlers’ culture.

However, by the early 19th century, dogs were increasingly seen as members of the family. Per the statement, this shift occurred because “an increasingly urbanized environment fostered a greater reliance on domesticated animals to preserve a sense of attachment to the natural world.” The exhibition includes an abundance of family portraits featuring dogs and cats, which show how pets became “fixtures in domestic spheres,” writes  Time Out ’s Emma Pilkington.

A pair of photos taken by  William Davis Hassler around 1912 and 1913 show his family accompanied by Reddy the Cat. Other images depict animals in more functional roles: a pony pulling a child’s carriage, for example, or one of the first  seeing-eye dogs .

“Pets and the City” also examines New York City’s evolving animal rights movement, like the pivotal  1866 anti-cruelty law and the founding of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals .

“New York City residents have always loved their pets, and this exhibition reveals the important role that pets have played throughout the city’s history beyond providing companionship to their owners,” says Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the historical society, in the statement. ​​ “I hope visitors come away from this exhibition with a deeper appreciation for the profound impact pets have had on our city’s culture and society and a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of our animals.”

“ Pets and the City ” will be on view at the New-York Historical Society from October 25, 2024, to April 27, 2025.

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Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.

People in your neighborhood: Photo essay from Humans of Syracuse

• Published: Feb. 01, 2015, 11:15 a.m.
• Humans of Syracuse

Humans of Syracuse is a Facebook page with 19,170 followers and counting. Photographer Kathe Harrington explores the neighborhoods of Syracuse, observing regular folks and learning a little about their personal stories.

This month her photo essay for syracuse.com is titled " Who are the People in Your Neighborhood? ."

Here's her introduction to the photos: "I'd be lying if I said this Sesame Street song doesn't run through my head on a regular basis when i'm out shooting! So that's the theme of this essay. I'm sure you can finish the song. "

More Humans of Syracuse >> See all the Humans of Syracuse photo essays on syracuse.com . >> Humans of Syracuse on Facebook

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• Street & Documentary

Humans of New York

By beau 1664876222 April 30, 2012 in Street & Documentary

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Beau 1664876222.

<p>Sorry if this has been discussed previously, but what do we think of HONY?<br>

It seems like in a very short time it's become an absolute phenomenon; everywhere I go people seem to be talking about it.<br>

I have to admit the guy's a special talent, both in terms of the portraits and the witty captions. I do find myself scrolling through his latest pics quite regularly.<br>

On the other hand it reminds me a little too much of stuff like "The Sartorialist" where there's too much reliance on attractive people and their clever fashions to keep your attention. <br>

Anyway, I figure some of the street denizens here would have some thoughts on it.</p>

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<p>This is the first time I've heard of it, so maybe it's a thing people in New York are talking about.<br>

<br />I think it's an admirable project, I give the guy credit for working so diligently on a specific project, as opposed to randomly shooting, or cleaning equipment. I think it's great that he is writing also, that makes it interesting, and it helps understand context for him and the subjexts.</p>

<p>With respect to attractive people and clever fashions (not sure those would pass as clever here in San Francisco), well there has to be something beyond a random face. Whether it's an expression, situation, or look or clothing, there still has to be something that interests viewers. (Notable exception: celebrities.)</p>

Music and Portraits

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<p>The spirit of August Sander lives on.</p>

<p>A link for those who aren't familiar w/this: http://www.humansofnewyork.com/</p>

<p>Thanks for the responses. By way of background, I'm not sure exactly how many followers or viewers this guy has, but I'm sure it's a big number and as I mentioned, there's a lot of word-of-mouth about it in NYC. There's a buzz as if a great new TV series has come out or something.<br>

What I enjoy about his pictures, and about his success, is how the images are not really about the photography, or about the photographer. Sure he's doing a lot of subtle things to make the images look good, but I never hear people saying, "wow, what great photos" or "wow what a great photographer that guy is." People just fall in love with the project without being conscious of the craft involved, or even really focusing on the artist himself. I guess there's some good lessons in there for many of us.</p>

<p>You know what's funny? I'd never even been to his website; I was only familiar with his facebook page. In a way, I find the FB "blog" the most powerful presentation of his work, just the pictures (tons of them) and his little notes on each one.</p>

<p><a href=" http://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork">http://www.facebook.com/humansofnewyork</a></p>

• Henri Matisse. “Creativity takes courage”

I think it's a very nice and life affirming project he's doing, especially appropriate for the people of NYC, who lived through the trauma of 9/11. I fail to see any sophistication at all with the photography itself though, at least with regard to aesthetics or composition. They're just snapshots anyone could do.

<p>Hello Ray! Hope you're well. I guess you've touched on the point of my post. This guy is not interested in drawing attention to his photography. There are no stylistic affectations, no technical flourishes, no carefully-chosen gear involved. He's like a photographer for the post-photography era. <br>

That being said, I disagree that these are snapshots anyone could do. He's got a great feel for the timing involved in portraiture and his use of light, composition, background, etc. is very effective. But of course most of what he's doing is about his ideas and, I guess, his interactions with his subjects.<br>

Mainly I just think he's worth talking about because here's a street photographer who's become a phenomenon; how often does that happen? Hundreds of thousands of people eagerly await each of his photos. So clearly there's something worth examining about what he's doing.</p>

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My Favorite Simone Biles Moment Wasn’t When She Won Gold

By Liriel Higa

Opinion Audience Director

GOAT. Most decorated. Winningest. It sounds hokey, but the most satisfying and joyful part of the Olympics for me is not which country is leading the medal count but when the best athletes in the world show their respect and admiration for one another, especially after an underperformance. On Monday, the last day of the artistic gymnastics competition, Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles, the Americans who took silver and bronze medals in the floor exercise final, showed such sportsmanship to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who won gold.

During the medal ceremony, Biles and Chiles bowed down to the Brazilian as she climbed the podium to receive her medal. Andrade had already come in second to Biles in the all-around and vault event finals , but she took advantage of Biles’s two out-of-bounds landings to take first on floor.

Andrade was runner-up to Biles at the 2023 World Championships and second to Suni Lee at the Tokyo Olympics all-around. It may have been frustrating to keep coming in second, but she has been consistently supportive over the years, saying, for instance, that it was an “honor” to compete against Biles.

For her part, Biles has acknowledged her own fallibility and reminded us that just because she makes winning look easy does not mean that it is. After the all-around final, Biles said of Andrade: “She’s way too close. I’ve never had an athlete that close, so it definitely put me on my toes, and it brought out the best athlete in myself.”

Of course, it’s easy to be gracious when you’ve won the gold. On Monday, in what might be her final Olympic performance, Biles took the silver on floor after a disappointing fifth-place finish on the balance beam. But when Chiles suggested that they bow down to Andrade, Biles eagerly agreed, creating one of the most iconic images from these Olympics.

Chiles explained their thinking during an interview after the competition. “Why don’t we just give her her flowers?” she said. “Not only has she given Simone her flowers but a lot of us in the United States our flowers as well. So giving it back is what makes it so beautiful. So I felt like it was needed.”

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Five things to know about Tim Walz

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris decided on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in her bid for the White House.

Minnesota voters gathered outside Governor Tim Walz’s residence react as Walz was announced as the running mate of Kamala Harris in the U.S. presidential election. (AP Video by Mark Vancleave)

Vice President Kamala Harris has picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to be her running mate, turning to a Midwestern governor, military veteran and union supporter who helped enact an ambitious Democratic agenda for his state.

FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, right, laughs as he stands with Fridley, Minn., Mayor Scott Lund during a visit to the Cummins Power Generation Facility in Fridley, Minn., Monday, April 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

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FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz applauds as President Joe Biden speaks at Dutch Creek Farms in Northfield, Minn., Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

FILE - Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz listens after meeting with President Joe Biden, July 3, 2024, at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaks during a news conference for the Biden-Harris campaign discussing the Project 2025 plan during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention near the Fiserv Forum, Wednesday, July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee. (AP Photo/Joe Lamberti)

FILE - Minnesota Governor Tim Walz greets reporters before Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Planned Parenthood, March 14, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File)

FILE - Rep. Betty McCullum, D-Minn., left, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, listen as Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Planned Parenthood, March 14, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File)

▶ Follow AP’s live coverage of the 2024 election

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris has decided on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate in her bid for the White House. The 60-year-old Democrat and military veteran rose to the forefront with a series of plain-spoken television appearances in the days after President Joe Biden decided not to seek a second term. He has made his state a bastion of liberal policy and, this year, one of the few states to protect fans buying tickets online for Taylor Swift concerts and other live events.

Some things to know about Walz:

Walz comes from rural America

It would be hard to find a more vivid representative of the American heartland than Walz. Born in West Point, Nebraska, a community of about 3,500 people northwest of Omaha, Walz joined the Army National Guard and became a teacher in Nebraska.

He and his wife moved to Mankato in southern Minnesota in the 1990s. That’s where he taught social studies and coached football at Mankato West High School, including for the 1999 team that won the first of the school’s four state championships. He still points to his union membership there.

Walz served 24 years in the Army National Guard, rising to command sergeant major, one of the highest enlisted ranks in the military, although he didn’t complete all the training before he retired so his rank for benefits purposes was set at master sergeant.

He has a proven ability to connect with conservative voters

In his first race for Congress, Walz upset a Republican incumbent. That was in 2006, when he won in a largely rural, southern Minnesota congressional district against six-term Rep. Gil Gutknecht. Walz capitalized on voter anger with then-President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

During six terms in the U.S. House, Walz championed veterans’ issues.

He’s also shown a down-to-earth side, partly through social media video posts with his daughter, Hope. One last fall showed them trying a Minnesota State Fair ride, “The Slingshot,” after they bantered about fair food and her being a vegetarian.

He could help the ticket in key Midwestern states

While Walz isn’t from one of the crucial “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where both sides believe they need to win, he’s right next door. He also could ensure that Minnesota stays in the hands of Democrats.

That’s important because former President Donald Trump has portrayed Minnesota as being in play this year, even though the state hasn’t elected a Republican to statewide office since 2006. A GOP presidential candidate hasn’t carried the state since President Richard Nixon’s landslide in 1972, but Trump has already campaigned there .

When Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton decided not to seek a third term in 2018, Walz campaigned and won the office on a “One Minnesota” theme.

Walz also speaks comfortably about issues that matter to voters in the Rust Belt. He’s been a champion of Democratic causes, including union organizing, workers’ rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

He has experience with divided government

In his first term as governor, Walz faced a Legislature split between a Democratic-led House and a Republican-controlled Senate that resisted his proposals to use higher taxes to boost money for schools, health care and roads. But he and lawmakers brokered compromises that made the state’s divided government still seem productive.

Bipartisan cooperation became tougher during his second year as he used the governor’s emergency power during the COVID-19 pandemic to shutter businesses and close schools. Republicans pushed back and forced out some agency heads. Republicans also remain critical of Walz over what they see as his slow response to sometimes violent unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

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Things got easier for Walz in his second term, after he defeated Republican Scott Jensen , a physician known nationally as a vaccine skeptic. Democrats gained control of both legislative chambers, clearing the way for a more liberal course in state government, aided by a huge budget surplus.

Walz and lawmakers eliminated nearly all of the state abortion restrictions enacted in the past by Republicans, protected gender-affirming care for transgender youth and legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

Rejecting Republican pleas that the state budget surplus be used to cut taxes, Democrats funded free school meals for children, free tuition at public colleges for students in families earning under $80,000 a year, a paid family and medical leave program and health insurance coverage regardless of a person’s immigration status.

He has an ear for sound-bite politics

Walz called Republican nominee Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance “just weird” in an MSNBC interview last month and the Democratic Governors Association — which Walz chairs — amplified the point in a post on X . Walz later reiterated the characterization on CNN, citing Trump’s repeated mentions of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter from the film “Silence of the Lambs” in stump speeches.

The word quickly morphed into a theme for Harris and other Democrats and has a chance to be a watchword of the undoubtedly weird 2024 election.

Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.