I'm not even really attempting to brand myself outside of 'Humans of New York.' I think part of the reason for my success is that I've put my ego aside and said I'm not going to put all of my effort into trying to promote myself. I'm going to try to promote my work and am going to try to promote my project.
Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.
The interviews have gotten much longer with 'Humans of New York.' When I was first starting, I was just photographing people. And then I went to just kind of including a quote or two. Now when I'm approaching somebody on the street, I'm spending about 30 to 45 minutes with them often.
When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
When I meet somebody in the street who knows about 'Humans of New York,' a lot of times they might have a scripted answer, and that scripted answer is the first thing to come out of their mouth.
When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.
Whenever you get a large body of work like 'Humans of New York,' a natural pathway becomes to put it between two covers. I wanted this to be a very nice keepsake. A lot of work went into it, and a lot of fans are attached to it.
I've got 50,000 Facebook fans inside of Iran, and Facebook is banned in Iran. I think the people who follow 'Humans of New York' the most after New York City is Tehran. I have a really special affection for the Persian people because they've really taken to my work.
I've done commercial work for Amtrak. However, that was branded as Stanton. I stipulated at the very beginning that it was not going to involve 'Humans of New York,' that I wasn't going to promote it on 'Humans of New York.' So nobody who follows me really even knows that I did it.
I've always felt like an artistic person. I can't draw or paint or sculpt. I never really had technical skills, but I've always felt like I appreciate really beautiful things, and part of taking a good photograph is being able to recognize beauty.
In July of 2010, I lost my finance job in Chicago. Instead of updating my resume and looking for a similar job, I decided to forget about money and have a go at something I truly enjoyed. I'd purchased a semi-professional camera earlier that year and spent my free time taking photos in downtown Chicago.
I'm a believer in the ordinary person, that the ordinary person is just as important and has an equally unique perspective on the world as someone who is famous or perhaps more privileged.
I think that even though some of the things on 'Humans of New York' are kind of very personal and very revealing, I think the discomfort with sharing that tends to be overwritten by the appreciation of being able to distill the experience of your life into a story and share it with other people.
I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.
I never buy plane tickets out of a country until I'm in the country, so I get on the ground, figure out what I need, where I'm going, how much time I need, and schedule as I go along.
I know I have a caption that I'm going to use when somebody tells me something I've never heard before. It's very rarely a thought, a philosophy, when somebody says, 'Oh, I don't like cheese' or 'Oh, I think the government should be overthrown,' because so many people share these thoughts. But what people don't share is stories.
I am interviewing people with a spirit of genuine interest and compassion, and therefore, the general tone of the site is one of genuine interest and compassion. The moment that culture changes, 'Humans of New York' is no longer viable.
I always say that my favorite people to interview are the people who are at the beginning and the ends of their lives because they have two alternate perspectives of the world, and neither of them are less profound.
'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.
'Humans of New York' is basically somebody walking up to absolute strangers on the street every day and, within minutes, talking with them about very personal things. Some things they haven't even told their best friends or family members.
