We, as humans, tend to share our stories; oral traditions have been passed down generation to generation for generations, and I, for one, never went to sleep without a bed time book as a child. We obsess over Hollywood, a major industry based on the art of story telling. We write and read fiction, for the sheer value of a good story. We save funny anecdotes for dinner parties, the somber ones for late night conversations. More recently, we share a virtual timeline on Facebook and photo album on Instagram.
Humans of New York has taken hold of the story telling of the twenty-first century. Founded by Brandon Stanton, the project was founded with the goal to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers in their natural habitat and "create an exhaustive catalog of the city's in habitants." Slowly he started interviewing each of his subjects, and now with each photo, follows a story.
The HoNY project has expanded much past the boundaries of NYC's streets. Stanton has expanded the project to include series from all backgrounds, everything from pediatric cancer fighters and Syrian refugees.
Collectively, these coffee-table books represent our society. They capture the memories and philosophies and wishes and wills of every type of person in society. They capture the issues of our age, and how they affect people on a personal basis. More importantly, they expose us to people we may never meet, experiences we may never have. You are one of roughly 7 billion people. Your memories are confined to one of 7 billion living people making memories this very minute. There is no possible way a single person can experience all that a collective pool of 7 billion people can. These micro-interviews expose us to lifestyles that seem foreign and then normalizes these lifestyles.
Not everyone will have to perform an at-home abortion, nor fight in a war, nor fall in love, nor feel the weight of being a certain ethnicity. Humans of New York presents these stories in a human light, puts a face with the feeling, and makes these stories more personal than a news segment or radio interview. Humans of New York exposes me to people and places I will never know but simultaneously encourages me to empathize with them, see their decisions, their stories, as result of their experiences. It adds rationale to decisions I don't agree with and helps me learn from others mistakes, so I don't have to make them myself. It teaches me what led other to success, encouraging to emulate those same movements in my own life.
Humans of New York provides a compelling narrative for all arguments of 21st-century policy, by adding a narrative and a face to everything. In a world that is becoming more surveys and statistics, the Humans of New York Project aims to capture the uncensored voices of our world in its most holistic form. We're just little mosaics of the moments that make us up. HoNY helps us share our artform with one another.
