Sonder: (n.) The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
On the bustling streets of a campus like Ohio State, it's easy to get lost in my own thoughts. Determined to make it to my next destination in time, I stride through the steady stream of faces, wrapped up in my own day. Excluding a quick visit with the occasional dog on the Oval, I rarely stop until I've made it to class.
However, if I were more like Brandon Stanton, it might have occurred to me that the faces passing by me are worth slowing down for.
On January 21, Stanton, the creator of the widely successful blog called "Humans of New York," stepped out from behind his camera lens to address Ohio State students through the Ohio Union Activities Board.
Five years ago, Stanton dropped everything to head to New York City and pursue a very specific type of photography. Stanton recalled his parents' frustration at this risky choice, remembering how crazy he looked to others for running off with a dream to tell the stories of New York, one human at a time.
"All I thought about all the time was markets. I was just obsessed with markets. For two years, it was all I thought about," said Stanton of his job in Chicago. "And the day I lost my job, it was paradoxically a good day."
Stanton's original idea was to take 10,000 candid portraits of New Yorkers on the street, eventually plotting them on a map. He noted how the "Humans of New York" we know today, which generates millions of likes on Facebook every day, looks very different from his initial dream. "Humans of New York" truly took off when Stanton began to include interviews with his portraits. The quotes beneath the pictures are jarringly honest, exposing the regrets, sorrows, and celebrations of people that you or I might simply walk right past. Stanton also expanded his work to tell the stories of refugees in Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and more.
The most difficult part of the project, Stanton told the crowd with his good-natured humor, was getting over the discomfort of taking a stranger's photograph. "It seemed a little weird at first. Would a stranger even let you take a picture of them? Is that even OK?" The students laughed.
However, once Stanton took his first truly meaningful picture, he knew he had something special. "I lifted my camera really slowly, and I took that picture. I felt such a sense of accomplishment. I was so afraid to do it, to break that boundary between me and a stranger. I knew that if I mastered getting over that fear of approaching a stranger, I could create a unique type of photography."
Stanton has certainly conquered his stranger-phobia. "Humans of New York" followers can count on multiple posts per day, with captions that are everything from enlightening to tragic to delightful.
Many wonder how Stanton can provoke such intimate responses from people he doesn't know. His strategy is simple: "There's nothing I won't ask. These are things that would make people cringe at cocktail parties." Again laughter rippled through the ballroom. "If you're coming from a place of sincerity and genuine interest and compassion, there's so much you can learn from people. There's almost nothing they won't tell you."
The vast success of "Humans of New York" is in its gripping honesty. Stanton knows how compelling his work can be, especially for the subjects he interviews. "When you're asked to tell your story, it reaches down into all your experiences, everything you've been through, and it makes it mean something."
In a society of carefully constructed social media personalities and numbing small talk, Stanton has brought us something we all crave: authenticity.
We spend every day racing through campus to get from point A to point B, all on the pretense of chasing knowledge and experience. "Humans of New York," however, is proof that not every life lesson and every connection will happen in the classroom.
