Since launching Humans of New York 12 years ago, Brandon Stanton has pivoted his blog into a one-man philanthropy that raises millions of dollars for random people. lisaxmiller reports
Photo: Beth Sacca Brandon Stanton was seated on a metal folding chair in the cavernous basement of an East Harlem café. He leaned forward and jabbed at the air with long, pale fingers. “I love the idea of juice! Juice, juice, juice!” he said. “I’m excited!”
Stanton avoids forecasting sales; he knows that internet virality is an elusive mark. Nevertheless, he does what he can to design success, and at the moment, he had concerns about the price of the juice: $60 for a 12-pack of an unfamiliar beverage is steep, even in service of a worthy cause. In Stanton’s view, the Diallos ought to smooth the way, perhaps by reducing the price of the juice with a coupon code. “I’m shocked at how much people love coupons,” he said.
One of the first HONY posts to draw attention is of Elizabeth Sweetheart, who becomes known on the internet as the Green Lady of Brooklyn. This 2011 post helps Stanton settle on his format of writing the caption in the subject’s own words. Photo: Brandon Stanton In 2015, Stanton features a Brownsville middle-schooler, Vidal, who names his principal, Nadia Lopez, as the biggest influence in his life. The post garners more than 1 million likes on Facebook.
I wasn’t at Stanton’s house for 20 minutes before he started to cry. When he interviews people, he always starts with “What is your biggest struggle right now?” And when I posed that question to him, he began by describing how difficult it was to attain his success and how single-minded he had been in the pursuit of it. When he was 19, he went through a phase of being very religious.
He attended a local private high school. There, Adam Schaefer, who remains a close friend, remembers that Stanton wasn’t a great athlete but was an eager one: On the football field, “he hit people hard.” In his sophomore year, a legendary ballplayer named Andrew Kown transferred to their school, and shortly after his arrival, Stanton created the AKFC: the Andrew Kown Fan Club.
The idea, originally, was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot them on a map. Stanton had moved to the city in the fall of 2010 and was just walking around taking pictures of strangers. He began posting four images a day to Facebook, and he called his project Humans of New York. He was not, he admits, a good photographer, but in a way, that was his edge: He was every dude, awestruck at the exhibition of humanity on display in the city.
In 2015, Stanton posted the story of a middle-schooler in Brownsville: a Black boy in a hoodie smiling ruefully against a backdrop of housing projects. In the caption, the boy admitted he and his friends sometimes got in trouble but his principal, Ms. Lopez, gave him a reason to work hard and be proud of himself. “She doesn’t suspend us,” he said in the post. “She calls us into her office and explains how society was built down around us.
In 2019, Stanton introduces his audience to the striptease artist Tanqueray, who later becomes a niche icon. Photo: Paul Ninson These days, Stanton prefers to feature people with products or services to sell, but he has also deployed his generous audience to give thanks to his friends.
As soon as it succeeded, Humans of New York was satirized, its wide-eyed earnestness mocked by parody accounts like Lizard People of New York and Goats of Bangladesh. But the most durable criticism implicates Stanton for his refusal to engage in political debate. This critique took hold especially in the aftermath of his travels on behalf of the U.N.
Before we met with the Diallos, I went with Stanton to interview a middle-aged white woman whose name had come to him from a HONY reader. The woman had left her husband by the side of an Arkansas highway after decades in an abusive marriage in a strict Christian sect. She now lived in Harlem and had found safety and community there.
Stanton admits he has amassed enormous power, but when faced with the question of what it all means — the new responsibilities that come with his project’s maturity — he gets brittle and repeats that he’s just trying to give power away. “Would you say that final approval is the greatest amount of power a storyteller can give to his/her subject?” he texted me one night.
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