Brandon Stanton's success story is uncommon even by New York standards. He came here, unemployed, to pursue a hobby, photography. Now, only a few years later, his work is known around the world. NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following report.
It starts with an old-fashioned idea: actual human connection. First, a request to take their picture, and then to have a conversation.
Brandon Stanton has been roaming New York and beyond for seven years, capturing these interactions for his popular blog and best-selling book Humans of New York.
"Stories go viral, and tens and tens of millions of people will read these," Stanton says. "Something mixed with that reach and the anonymity of the people involved, that it was just a random person on the bench who maybe might not have told their story to anybody before, something about that combination, I think is very exciting to me."
Stanton works alone. He has no staff. It's just him, his Canon Mark 3 5D camera and his need to hit the streets every day.
"Humans of New York started with passion But it was built on discipline. It was built on not taking days off. It was built on, no matter how I felt on any given day, I'm going to stop random people on the street until I get four photos and four interviews every single day," Stanton says.
"There's days when I'll go out, even with the success of the blog now, and I'll approach 10 people, and they'll all stiff arm me or, you know, give me a very rude response, and I'll have to sit down and I lose my confidence. And I'm just like, 'Why would anyone ever say yes to this?'"
More than 10,000 have. His work has become so well-known, people now want to take pictures of him. So when he approaches someone, they often know exactly what he is up to.
Stanton initially feared all this attention and popularity might hurt the authenticity of the interviews.
"I found that, even if it's the biggest fan of the blog who is very excited and very nervous at the first moment, through a 45-minute conversation, we can always get to a quiet, authentic place," he says.
After more than two years of photographing random people in New York, Stanton branched out, traveling first to Iran, then to places like India and South Sudan, often focusing on people dealing with a variety of struggles: refugees, Syrian-Americans, children fighting cancer.
He spent a month at Memorial Sloan Kettering for a series of photos on young patients and their families. After hours of interviews, he'd walk to Central Park.
"The normal world out here in the park where parents die before their kids and childhood is a happy place and nature is just and benevolent, and a few miles down the road, this world where nothing makes sense, it does not make sense, and it's unexplainable, and God is very hard to find," Stanton says. "And it was very emotional. And I cried the entire four weeks."
His photos of a student and his principal helped to raise more than $1 million for a school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and led to a White House trip to meet President Barack Obama.
His saga of a refugee scientist in Syria also attracted White House attention, resulting in an invitation to a State of the Union address.
And a crowdfunding campaign tied to his Sloan-Kettering photos has raised close to $4 million for pediatric cancer research.
Stanton is not a hit-and-run do-gooder. Two years after photographing the plight of bonded laborers, a kind of indentured servant, in Pakistan, Stanton still pays for protecting an activist who became known because of Humans of New York.
"It can be very hard to get perspective on it," he says. "That's why I walk, always alone, with my dog for three miles every night. And that kind of takes me out of the routine of doing it every single day, allows me to look backwards and appreciate everything that's happened."
Stanton's background story would itself make for an interesting post on Humans of New York. He initially flunked out of the University of Georgia.
"Experiencing a kind of embarrassing failure very early in life, to where all my friends and family were like, 'What happened to Brandon?' And kind of realizing that that's OK and that you can persevere through that," he says.
He went back to school, graduated, became a bond trader, then lost his job in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.
While out of work, he decided to pursue his passion for photography full-time. He moved to New York hoping to photograph 10,000 people.
"At the beginning of Humans of New York, nobody thought it was a good idea," Stanton says. "For my parents, I think it was just glorified unemployment."
He began writing captions to accompany the pictures, then little stories, all of which required interviews. His work gained notice and a following on Facebook, which led to a book deal.
"There had been so much risk and so much loneliness and so much sacrifice in moving here alone to do this," he says.
"I thought we were going to definitely be a best seller, but I didn't think it was possible to be number one. And when i got that call from my agent, I was at the Navy Yard at an event, and I just sat down where I was in the parking lot and just sobbed for an hour."
Stanton earns his living through book sales and speeches, like an appearance at a university in Dublin.
"Notice I never tell them about the interview at first," he says at the event. "But it's important. You don't want to just drop it on them. You know what I mean? Like, 'Can I take your photo and ask you about your mom's cancer or anything like that?'"
He refuses to make money from the traffic his website generates.
"I will never put up a promoted post. I will never put up an advertisement," he says. "The websites have no advertisements."
Not everyone is a fan. Critics complain that his profiles amount to caricature. Stanton disputes this. He says his photos allow people to open a window into their lives, building connections in an impersonal world.
"The metaphor I think of is, just because a leaf is not the whole tree, does that mean the leaf doesn't have value? Does that mean the angle or the story of someone's life that you got in an hour is not worth sharing?" he says.
"So that's what Humans of New York is. It is this bubble of intimacy created on the street with an absolute stranger that allows for stories to be told that can connect with people on a very intimate, vulnerable level itself."