Thursday, April 10, 2014

Brandon Stanton

Brandon Stanton is a photographer and blogger who created the photo Blog, Humans of New York. He was born on March 1, 1984 in Marietta, Georgia. He majored in history at the University of Georgia. After college he traded bonds on the Chicago Board of Trade. However two years later in 2008, he lost his job. Stanton left Chicago and decided he wanted travel across the country and take portraits of strangers on the street.(HONY: About)
It was in 2010 when Stanton had decided to purchased a semi-professional camera, a Canon EOS 7D. He had no previous photography experience; he just started walking around Chicago taking photos. He then moved around from Chicago to New Orleans, then Pittsburg, and Philadelphia. His photos went from city sights to eventually candid portraits of people on the street. Then he began actually going up to his subjects and asked for permission to take their photo. In August of 2010, he reached New York and thought he was only going to stay for a little while before heading towards the West Coast. That never happened, because he decided that New York was the perfect location to continue his portraits. He started roaming all over the streets of New York taking photos and began compiling them in album in which he called “Humans of New York” which was located on his Facebook page. He had originally only taken photos, but in November of 2010 he began having conversations with his subjects, and adding quotes as captions. (Wikipedia: Brandon Stanton)

The popularity of his photos began to grow and in 2010 he created a Tumblr and was also featured in an issue of Vogue. By 2013 his blog had over 6,000 photos. His Facebook had 1.6 million followers and 400,000 on Tumblr. He won the category of “Best Use of Photography” at the Webby Awards in 2013. On October 13, 2013 his first book, Humans of New York  was released. It was a book that was a compilation of some of the photos on his blog. Before it was even released, the book had sold 30,000 copies as preorders. In the week of November 3, 2013 the book reached the number 1 position on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers list. Stanton was also placed on the TIME magazine list of “30 Under 30 World Changers”. Humans of New York now has over four million followers on social media sites such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram. Stanton continues to walk to streets and take photos of the citizens of New York. He even plans on releasing another book, a children’s book called Little Humans later in 2014.(Wikipedia: Brandon Stanton)

Works Cited
"HONY: About." Humans of New York. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. <http://www.humansofnewyork.com/about>.

"Brandon Stanton." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Stanton>.
Photo URL:
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/photographer
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/81487587137/he-just-tried-to-get-his-tennis-ball-off-the-roof

No comments:

Post a Comment