Quick Facts
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Biography
Brandon Stanton (born March 1, 1984) is an American best selling author, photographer, and blogger. He is known as author of best selling Humans of New York book, as one of Time Magazine's 30 Under 30 People Changing The World, and the founder of Humans of New York, a popular photojournalistic work that has over 17.8 million likes on Facebook and around 5.7 million followers on Instagram as of late August 2016.
Since 2010, Stanton has taken hundreds of street photographic portraits of ordinary people living and working primarily in New York City, accompanied by snippets of conversations about their lives.
Life and work
Stanton grew up in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, where he completed his schooling from The Walker School in 2002. He majored in history at the University of Georgia. In 2010, he bought a camera while working as a bond trader in Chicago, and started taking photographs in downtown Chicago on the weekends. When he lost his job a short time later, he decided to pursue photography full-time. Moving to New York, he set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their portraits on a map of the city without compromising his dream through monetization, surviving on unemployment checks to "almost pay rent" and borrowing money from friends and family. Eventually, his photographs were shifted to the Humans of New York Facebook page, which he started in November 2010. After posting a photo a woman in all green including a quote from her, he soon began adding captions and quotes to his photographs, which eventually evolved into full interviews.
His Humans of New York book was published in October 2013. It received good reviewsand sold 30,000 copies as preorders. Ahead of the release, he was interviewed by Bill Weir, for ABC News Nightline. The book reached number 1 position on The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers of 2013 for the week beginning November 3, 2013. The book remained on the list for 26 weeks, again reaching the number one position on December 21, 2014.
In December 2013, Stanton was named one of Time Magazine's 30 Under 30 People Changing The World. In August 2014, Stanton traveled to the Middle East, to photograph people as a part of a 50-day trip through 10 countries in the region under the auspices of the United Nations. In July 2015 he traveled to Pakistan and again to Iran to do the same. At the conclusion of his trip to Pakistan, Stanton crowd funded $2.3 million to help end bonded labor in Pakistan.
In January 2015, Stanton was invited to the Oval Office to interview President Barack Obama. The trip concluded a two-week crowd funding campaign on Humans of New York in which $1.4 million was raised.
In March 2016, Stanton opposed Donald Trump's presidential campaign because he reached a moral decision to criticize Trump for hateful speech, such as delayed disavowing "white supremacy" and defending those who commit violence at his rallies; a day after the post it had over 1.6 million likes and it was shared nearly one million times.
His latest project was posting stories and photos from the Pediatrics Department of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. As with other projects, Brandon created a fundraising campaign and raised over $3.8 million for pediatric cancer research.
Publications
- Humans of New York. New York: St. Martin's Press. October 15, 2013. ISBN 978-1-250-03882-1.
- Little Humans of New York. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. October 7, 2014. ISBN 978-0374374563.
- Humans of New York: Stories. New York: St. Martin's Press. October 13, 2015. ISBN 978-1250058904.
Awards
- 2013: People's Voice award, Best Use of Photography category, 2013 Webby Award for Humans of New York.
- 2013: Time magazine placed him in its list of "30 Under 30 World Changers".
- 2014: James Joyce Award from the Literary and Historical Society (L&H) of University College Dublin (UCD).
- "Best Use of Photography". The Webby Awards Gallery. Retrieved 2013-10-26.
- Callie Schweitzer (December 16, 2013). "30 Under 30: Humans of New York Photographer Brandon Stanton". Time.com. Retrieved 2013-12-17.
- "Humans of New York creator, Brandon Stanton honoured by UCD Literary & Historical Society". UCD News, University College Dublin. 24 April 2014. Retrieved 2014-08-13.