New York City can be a lonely place. When I first moved into the Big Apple I barely knew a soul, and I soon discovered that it was much harder to meet people here than in a university city where students and twenty-somethings tend to hang out in the same bars and coffee shops. It seems counter-intuitive, but in a city of millions it is easy to feel completely alone.
When walking through sea of unfamiliar people all rushing to get from A to B, the faceless crowds merge into a giant mass. But stop at a streetside café and in just five minutes you can witness a thousand different personalities busily rushing by. New Yorkers are an incredibly diverse bunch, and there are always characters to see; from well-shod ladies lunching in Louboutins to graffiti artists scrambling into dark corners to find a space for their next project, New York has it all. And all of these people – even the most dull looking commuters in suits – have stories to tell, opinions to offer, and lives to recount.
Snapping New York City
One inspired photographer, trying to combat his own isolation in the city, launched a project to humanize the New York masses. Humans of New York, now a successful website with a million daily views, began life as a personal project by Brandon Stanton. Having moved to New York in August 2010, Stanton started snapping pictures of interesting looking people on the street. “There were a lot of lonely times,” Stanton writes of his first months in the city, “I knew nobody in New York … All I did was take photographs.” He uploaded his pictures onto Facebook, entitling the album “Humans of New York,” and then feeling that there were potentially millions more photographic subjects just outside his door, decided that he would built a photographic census of the city by taking 10,000 street portraits of New Yorkers. The project evolved when Stanton started to interview his subjects and upload their stories alongside the images on an official Humans of New York Facebook Page. Now over 850,000 people ‘like’ Stanton’s Facebook page, and his website features a huge number of pictures and stories about New Yorkers. Stanton even took his camera along on a recent trip to Iran, where snapped and interviewed those he met on his travels.
Humans of New York is a great reminder that there are eight million individuals walking the streets of New York City. From Brooklyn to Harlem, in Queens, the Bronx, and central Manhattan – and everywhere in between – blocks and avenues bustle with life. The same is true in cities, towns and even tiny villages across the world. For those of us who have made the scary move across seas and border crossings to make new lives in unfamiliar places, we need to find a way of discovering the humanity in our new home, so we can make friends and get to know people. So perhaps we should all pick up a camera and get snapping.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophiejpitman
