The Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) teamed up with the Hopkins Organization for Programming (HOP) to host award-winning photographer Brandon Stanton on Wednesday. Holding to this year’s FAS theme of “Chaos/Catalyst/Clarity,” Stanton spoke about his personal experience transitioning from working as a Chicago bond trader to a street photographer by highlighting the evolution of his Humans of New York (HONY) page.
Stanton spent his childhood in Atlanta. Having graduated as a history major from the University of Georgia, Stanton acquired the bond trading job after what he described as a lucky interview involving a gamble on Obama winning the presidency. Because of the tenuous job market, Stanton discussed how he constantly feared losing his job.
“I was trading money to make money,” Stanton said. “I was always telling myself the primary way to keep score [in bond trading] is to make money, and I always thought ‘I’ll just make this money, and then I’ll do something I really love. I’ll make this money and I’ll maybe start a company, pursue the arts or something of that sort.’”
It was thanks to his stressful job that he first decided to pick up photography. Having won $3,000 in a bet on a football game, Stanton decided to splurge it all on an expensive camera.
“I needed something to compartmentalize my life,” Stanton said. “I would go to downtown Chicago every day I wasn’t working, and I’d just photograph everything, and I just loved doing it.”
Stanton credits his nascent love for photography as the impetus for the creation of HONY. After he was fired from his job, Stanton took to honing his photography skills in order to motivate himself to keep working. No longer bound to his Chicago day job, Stanton had the time to pursue his passions.
“[HONY] wasn’t some sort of grand idea that I had... it just came out of my love of photography and [has been] constantly evolving, evolving and evolving,” Stanton said. “If I had [kept on] waiting for that perfect idea, if I had waited for ‘I’m gonna stop and learn about photography more before I share their stories,’ I would never have gotten here.”
Initially, HONY started out purely as a photography blog. Stanton discussed how he greatly enjoyed capturing the diversity of people on the Chicago subways, so he came up with the idea of taking 10,000 photos and stitching them together digitally to create a location map of humans in New York.
“Everyone was just there and on the streets walking around and I said ‘Wow, I can make a really amazing website even if I’ve only been photographing for a few months,’” Stanton said. “I packed up my two suitcases with no money [and moved to New York].”
Despite his passion for photography, however, Stanton’s initial few years in New York were rough. Surviving on unemployment benefits and occasionally working an odd job or two, Stanton discussed the difficulty in starting any entrepreneurial project.
“The lion’s share of the work put in comes before anybody cares about your work, let alone considers buying your product,” Stanton said. “It’s easy to get your friends and your family to like you on Facebook, but I maxed them out real early. I [had to work] so hard before I had those people I did not know start to follow my work.”
Despite the difficulties, Stanton pressed onward. He accumulated a small following, gradually building toward a few hundred followers. It wasn’t until months later that HONY went truly viral.
“It was no longer just about the photography as it was me getting over that fear of strangers again,” Stanton said. “Isn’t the next stop just getting over the fear of talking to strangers, about learning about them?”
Stanton then explained how the blog’s explosive growth on social media had generally led him to pursue longer form stories on more regular citizens as opposed to the provocative imagery he initially pursued. He also detailed how he had become an expert at spotting people who seemed prepared for the interviews since he had personally heard hundreds of contrite memorized statements.
Stanton invited a student to the stage in order to demonstrate his interview style. Outlining the basic rules of journalism, Stanton metaphorically compared his interviews to flying a search-and-rescue helicopter.
“[Interviewing someone] is like flying a helicopter far above the ground, searching for someone, looking for something that nobody else has told me before,” Stanton said. “You start out with general questions and then swing in lower, finding out what’s different, and then swing in even lower.”
Stanton wrapped up the presentation by focusing on his hopes for HONY. He said that the center of HONY is the “bubble” that he forms on the street with a stranger.
“It’s not the writing, not the photography, it’s that bubble,” Stanton said. “Anywhere that bubble goes, HONY goes — HONY is about telling the personal stories of strangers and not just about the photos.”
Student attendees appreciated the opportunity to see Stanton, as long lines formed during both the question and answer session and the following book signing.
“I really admired how he can just go up to a stranger and be able to hold such a deep and meaningful conversation,” freshman Idy Ding said. “He has an amazing ability to make us see how we’re all more similar than we sometimes imagine.”
The FAS leadership thought Stanton fit the theme of “Chaos, Catalyst, Clarity.”
“We really wanted to get [speakers] relevant to college students this year,” Executive Committee Member Sam Romanoff said. “We really wanted to do something with the Internet this year like Facebook and Twitter and such, but those people have been done a number of times... we happened to see Humans of New York, and we all decided he’d make a great speaker for college students.”
