Humans of New York

I have bookmarked so many sites over the past few weeks with every intention of sharing them with you and then things just got in the way of me sitting down and actually writing them out.  Fortunately a lot of that has been due me actually getting into my workroom and making myself make new stuff.  Finishing a new project is a great feeling.  Anyway, I decided that I needed to carve out a little bit of time and share some of the great things (at least I think so!) that I've been finding.

First up- Humans of New York.  I don't know if you've heard of this blog or seen the Facebook page- I may be way behind on this- but the project is incredible.  I first caught a post going through my FB feed and liked the page so I can keep up with the new postings.

From the site's about page:

"My name is Brandon and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. HONY resulted from an idea that I had to construct a photographic census of New York City. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months with this goal in mind. But somewhere along the way, HONY began to take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog, which over the past two years has gained a large daily following. With nearly one million collective followers on Facebook and Tumblr, HONY now provides a worldwide audience with glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City."

So this guy and his team roam the city taking photos of interesting folks, and interview them, and then post a snippet to the site.  The raw human spirit that comes out is just amazing and you really feel for all the people you see.  Recent posts:

 "What are their superpowers?"

"This one can talk any enemy to death. And this one can knock her sister over."

(via

"The first cowboys were black. 
‘Cowboy’ was a derogatory term used to describe slaves that tended to the cows and horses." 

(via)

Honestly, you can just sit there and scroll through all the images and just get completely sucked in.  New York City is such a wide and varied place with so many people crammed in to such a small area, so to get to see all these individuals is really fun.  I hope you'll check it out.

Comments

  1. I follow is page on Facebook. I really love all the photos that he takes and I think it's awesome that he just picked up taking pictures one day. I heard about him when he had petition about his images being stolen by DKNY. I love reading all of the comments he gets from people and I think it's great that majority if not all of the money he gets from these photos go to charity. Also.. I think the guy is incorrect about the word 'cowboy'. After I saw that yesterday I looked up the origin and didn't find any reference to slavery.

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  2. I've never heard of this but I'm definitely checking it out. New York is easily the most diverse city I've ever visited, and I've still only been to Manhattan!

    Echoing what Ayla said about the word cowboy... I thought the first ones were from Mexico? I could be wrong, though.

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  3. I also have a terrible habit of bookmarking things with the best of intentions to blog about them and never do. I even started deleting the bookmarks because I figured by the time I realized I never blogged about them, the stories were so old that surely people had found them on their own. Maybe this will motivate me to be a better blogger? :)

    Also, I don't think I've seen this site before. I'm not on facebook, so I'll have to check out his blog.

    Hope you have a great week!

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  4. Of course I follow HONY! =D I love love love this FB page and sometimes pretty amused by the comments. A lot of his "stories" are very inspiring. :)

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  5. What a fascinating project! I hadn't heard of it before either. Thanks for sharing.

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  6. I LOVE this site! The recent one of the father reading to his daughter on the street is one of my favorites.

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