Brandon Stanton grew up near Atlanta and attended the University of Georgia before becoming a bond trader for three years. After these three years Stanton lost his job and decided he was going to move to New York to follow his passion for photography. He began taking candid portraits of people within the city and upload them onto his Facebook page which grew very rapidly with likes, as of now he has over 12.1 million followers on Facebook. He also later on made an Instagram account for the project 'Humans of New York' which has 2.1 million followers. A lot of Stanton's success is from his good use of social media, and also his photographs which photograph ever day people.
Stanton was first going to take 10,000 portraits of New Yorkers and plot them on a map of the city, so the viewer could click on each different area and be shown people from that area. But soon his idea evolved, because he began having conversations with the people he photographed and realised that all of them had something interesting to say. This meant his idea developed into taking portraits of people and then below or by the side, including a statement/ small story of the subjects choosing to go with it. This inclusion of text to go alongside his images made Stanton's 'Humans Of New York' even more popular than ever, this gives me ideas about how I could develop my idea to include text after I finish this project. This is because I want to keep the same formality with each area as I have already photographed. But in the future I could carry on this project and expand it to include text about the portraits, to make it more like Stanton's work. The text provides the viewer with deeper meaning behind the portrait that they would have never gotten unless it was there, because there is only so much you can take from a photograph.
He has also done a lot of charity work for different causes, as a way of giving back to the people which has received a lot of support for donations. His charity work include: Him photographing residents that were affected by Hurricane Sandy, this meant it added to his photographic portrait work but he wanted to give back to the people. He joined with Tumblr founder David Karp and launched an Indiegogo fundraiser for the victims, the original goal was $100,000, they raised $86,000 within the first 12 hours and ended up raising a total of $318,530 by the end of the campaign. He has also done other fundraisers, which meant in January 2015 his accumulated Indiegogo donations were over $1,014,000. How Stanton has given back to the communities he photographs is very inspiring, and will definitely remind me of something I can do to give back to the community of a future project I may do.
“No matter how much we tried to help my brother, he wouldn’t quit. We tried being there for him. Then we tried to throw money at the problem. We tried to set him up with rehab, doctors, psychologists, even a job. Then eventually we just sort of threw up our hands and stopped associating with him, thinking that the alienation might shock him into changing. I hadn’t spoken to him for two years when he killed himself.”
"My father passed away this year, so I’ve been trying to be a dad to my eleven year old brother. I’m his emergency contact at school now, so whenever something is wrong, or if he’s sick, it’s up to me to take action. And I’m going to have to teach him about sex soon. One day he’s going to ask me why two people are on top of each other. Do I just say it, or do I lead up to it with baby steps?"
His photographs as you can see are relatively simple, but do change in format. Some of them are more close up on the subject, and others further away, I guess he changes it depending on the background around the subjects and to keep his portraits looking fresh as he has taken so many. The stories themselves also vary depending on what the subject wants to talk about, some are very serious and others not so much. I think for his series, he has kept it very casual with what they want the text to be about and also the framing and poses the subjects take. This equals in his portraits looking very natural and real, which makes the viewer feel comfortable. Something to take away from his portraits that I can use in my own work is that the subject is doing something with their arms, like they're mid gesture (last image) or in the middle image he is holding a bag. This reinforces the natural feeling, and thus creates a portrait that represents the subject well.