Anyone mildly familiar with Facebook would surely have come across photos from the Humans of New York (HONY) page; a news story liked by a friend, shared on a timeline, or name-tagged for a laugh or as a dose of friendly motivation. The HONY page inspired several similar projects, including Khaula Jamil’s Humans of Karachi and the philosophical Goats of Bangladesh page. However, unlike these instantly popular offshoots, HONY had not really been envisioned by its founder, Brandon Stanton, as the hugely celebrated photo-blog it is today. Stanton gave up a successful stock trading career amid intense speculations from his closest peers and relatives to do something more fulfilling. He did not really have a passion for photography, but found it mildly gratifying; more than the desk job he had left behind. The HONY project started off as untitled photos on Stanton’s Facebook profile, and evolved gradually from a “photography blog to a storytelling blog”. A few years later, the project has led to three publications and several trips around the world, including a recent one to Pakistan.

The first book, Humans of New York, is a collection of Stanton’s earliest photographs, often with generic captions, like the Today in Microfashion series featuring children in fancy or unusual clothing. It is more graphic, with minimal dialogue between the photographer and his subject, and the captions, if any, are mostly the author’s own interpretation of his subjects’ poses. Photos range from paparazzi-like zoomed in shots to more interactive ones, but the human aspect, the subject’s own contribution to the shot, remains limited. The photographs are arranged in a seemingly random order page after page, and do not follow any particular thematic or stylistic consistency. The second book, Humans of New York: Stories, contains more text and is more organised: groups of similarly themed photos follow one another without overemphasising a particular concept before moving on to the next one.

Across both books some of the most appealing stories and photographs feature elderly people. Sober or ludicrous, these senior citizens speak of valuable life lessons; of unrequited expectations and unrealistic aspirations, but also of regretful what-ifs. Photos of children are another highlight, with their spontaneous posing, uninhibited answers, and unrestrained ambitions; like taking up jobs as a princess hairdresser, or as Ironman. Flipping back and forth across the elderly and the younger generation, both books skim lifetimes within their pages — what happened between these two generations? What went wrong, what worked out, and what took unexpected turns? In answer to these existential questions the books present the young people of today; students, couples, artists, workers, single parents, lone wolves. The photos of the young people are accompanied mostly by anecdotes about their struggles and their proudest accomplishments. Their stories give the reader perspective on how the mundanities taken for granted by one person can be another’s inconceivable hopes, or how someone’s most meaningful personal struggles are in actuality only the trivialities of life for someone else.

On the immensely popular Humans of New York project as a social commentary of our times

It is within these photos that young readers, who arguably make up the largest chunk of Stanton’s readership, can discover an assortment of perspectives on life, not much different from what Harper Lee or George Eliot offered their readers decades or over a century ago. The stories run across a wide emotional range: from the uninhibited expression of people’s most tender, innocent desires (“‘I’m homeless and I’m an alcoholic. But I have a dream.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I wanna go fishing’”), to the realisation of practical realities (“Most of the time impermanence hits you when someone dies, but it can hit you in life as well”); to instances of philosophical and spiritual enlightening (“‘I’m telling you. Prayer works.’ ‘What’s a time that prayer didn’t work for you?’ ‘The time I didn’t pray’”).

The photos themselves are not extraordinary examples of photographic equipment and techniques. Stanton uses a modest camera and mid-range lenses, and anyone familiar with professional photography today could instantly guess what minimal post-processing goes into the photos. Also immediately apparent to a photographer’s eye would be Stanton’s lack of adherence to certain standards of visual art: to photographic principles of visual balance, proportion, and the subject-backdrop relationship, to artistic enhancements like the bokeh effect or chiaroscuro or compositional aids like the golden ratio or the rule of thirds. He is no Ansel Adams or Steve McCurry; there is little that is artistic about the photos, except the subject, captured in a genuine, unrehearsed, unmediated pose. The simplicity of the photographs is enhanced by the decision to not use extravagant props or sets. Rudimentary props do occur in several dynamic photos: street fixtures, a tree, the subject’s own bicycles or skateboards, a park bench, or a pet. Most photos are shot spontaneously wherever an interesting subject is encountered.

The diversity of people featured in the books is remarkable and hints at just how much work went into carefully choosing the photos. It also indicates how culturally diverse New York actually is as a megacity, as well as an urban arena for pursuing, and indeed exhibiting, contemporary urban lifestyles. In the author’s words: “One amazing thing about New York is that you pass all these people with ultra-modern clothing and haircuts, then turn the corner and see someone from the ancient world.” These words sink in well with the stylistic sartorial spectrum captured in the books, going all across from the Oriental, religious, and traditional, through pop-culture-driven and punk rock to the ultramodern queer and surrealistic, and from grimly monochromatic hues to reckless colour combinations that would belittle Photoshop’s gigapixel paint palettes. In all its display of flamboyant diversity, New York could be anything from an amateur costume party to a formal fancy dress ball that refuses to age.

But the books are more than just a bunch of people’s colourful photos and their heart-warming stories; they provide critical insight into New York as an urban phenomenon as well. For example, being the street-level project that it is, HONY automatically excludes particular classes of people; the very rich, for example. A majority of the people featured here belong to the middle class, but a substantial number of daily-wage, poor and homeless people have also been included. Arranging their photos together without apparent categorisation into occupations, age groups, or income levels, the books attempt to reduce any visible cues for class distinctions communicated to the reader: the subjects’ personal stories eclipse their visible societal standing and are disjointed from more acute urban and social segregations. Additionally, the books can also be read as a geo-tagged anthropological study of the world’s most happening metropolis. Popular places like the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, Union Square, Lincoln Centre, and the Grand Central make frequent appearances and help the reader understand the specific physical character and social ambience of particular locations within the city, comparable to similar places in cities within non-American or non-Western contexts.

Within their sensitive approach to people’s stories, the books also indicate how the popular tools of social media are now more accessible and more credible, and how single, subjective stories now matter more than the projected standards of urban living. Going through the two books, the reader realises how the mass-advertised, media-driven, hyper-reality of luxury lifestyles, home décor, and the hegemonic values associated with urban living are in fact disjointed from reality, even in the West. These single stories, extrapolated to hundreds, and indeed millions, of people across New York, or across the USA, present a more vivid, pluralistic experience of everyday life as opposed to the sterile, tasteless simulacra of the utopian American dream and the glorified ‘land of opportunities’. Congruent with past and current societal discourses on urban identities and ideologies, be it Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class at the turn of the 20th century, or Amin Maalouf’s categorisation of intersecting identities in a rapidly homogenising global arena, the stories expressed herein also resonate with the most intricate of concepts in the social sciences, mellowed down to easily comprehensible vocabulary and scenarios relevant to a common urban dweller today.

But are the stories in the HONY project really all that new to the audience? Some of us may remember the Chicken Soup for the Soul books of the ‘90s: short and inspirational, they showcased the stories of ordinary people going about their very ordinary lives. The same stories of human potential and experience from two decades ago still stand relevant in today’s exceedingly globalising urban milieu.

Or, going further back than the ’90’s, one can locate so many of HONY’s stories in their historical counterparts; the classic Dickensian characters, painstakingly sketched to convey compassion or avarice, the lavish French lifestyles of the Marie Antoinettes and the Madame Bovaries, the apprehensive, metaphorical Gulliver and his Lilliputians, the glorified Arthurian legends retold by medieval minstrels. And besides these, the spiritual connotations of self-realisation amidst Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the Oriental, mystical yet highly moralistic Thousand and One Nights, conjured out of pure imagination but conveying the most basic of human fears and desires.

Avoiding oversimplification, the HONY stories could also be read as reinterpretations of the biblical narratives of parents and siblings, of nations and men of faith. Further down history we encounter independent thinkers and philosophisers narrating mythologies, stories of gods and demigods, and of heroes on epic quests, communicated orally or through rudimentary symbols. In all these instances, from prehistory down to HONY, it is usually the narrative of the human experience which takes centre stage. The propagation of these individual stories through the prevalent media of their times lends them acknowledgement and credibility, and a kind of validation of that individual experience as it gets propagated to the audience.

Today’s fragmentary, individualistic experiences and stories are no different from their primordial prototypes. The democratisation of accessible social media lends new opportunities to urban residents struggling to assert their mark on a fast-paced city and society through fleeting, whimsical orchestrations that might or might not be noticed by an audience, each in the pursuit to relish Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” for themselves — no different, again, from the glory of the Elizabethan ‘nine days’ wonder’ for medieval town dwellers. In this tradition, can we safely assume that if, in a hundred years, someone comes up with a digitally enhanced idea, transcending photos and books, of sharing personal content, the individual stories of people would still stand as relevant as they were centuries ago, and as they are today? And will they be about the same values, lessons, and aspirations? As technologically augmented lifestyles become more common, will the narration and sharing of human experience ever feel redundant? Will literature, art, and the human experience always remain intertwined in cycles of self-expression and corresponding acknowledgements? HONY is as credible an answer to these questions as was E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops a century ago.

The reviewer is an architect and is pursuing a Masters degree in City Planning at METU, Turkey.

Humans of New York
(Social Commentary)
By Brandon Stanton
St. Martin’s Press,
New York
ISBN: 978-1250038821
304pp.

Humans of New York: Stories
(Social Commentary)
By Brandon Stanton
St. Martin’s Press,
New York
ISBN: 978-1250058904
428pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 19th, 2016