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How to Choose the Optimum Focus Point s for I had just lost my job, so I had a little bit of money coming in from unemployment. I got a few small odd jobs doing photography — weddings and little stuff like that. And I thought, "This is going to last me three years. The first view I got into how much social media allows you to scale was with Amtrak. At that time, I had only been photographing for a year and a half. I wasn't that great of a photographer. I was still learning. But Amtrak asked me if I would do a shoot for them, and it was the only commercial job I've ever done.
They asked me how much money I wanted, and I go, "I don't know, you know? I'm just out here trying to make it. Whatever you think you could do would be great.
And to me, that was all the money in the world. All the money in the world. I thought, "I'm never going to have to worry about anything else with this for years. In the beginning, it was just rock solid discipline, you know?
And I can say that as somebody who flunked out of college and who, for the majority of my life, has not been a disciplined person at all. I flunked out of UGA because I wasn't going to class. I never had discipline, ever.
When I flunked out of school, I read Ben Franklin's autobiography. I saw how he lived his life and how structured and disciplined he was, and I started incorporating habits into my life. The first habit I formed was that I started reading pages a day every day. I did that for years — even when I went back to school. I went back to the University of Georgia and ended up making straight As. Even during that time, I would read pages every day on top of reading for school.
I started exercising and playing piano for an hour. And I did those things every single day for years, and then I got proficient at piano, I was in good shape, and I educated myself pretty intensely.
But I think the most important thing that was happening during that time was that I was learning discipline. Not only did my habits improve me in many ways, but I also got very good at the skill of creating habits in my life. So when Humans of New York came along, I knew taking a day off wasn't about the day of work that you lost, it was about breaking that habit. So no matter how I felt, no matter how insecure I was, no matter how lonely I was, no matter how sick I was, I went out and photographed every single day.
For years and years and years, I posted four photos a day, every single day. And this is when Humans of New York was dovetailing with the rise of Facebook. That discipline of posting and constantly putting it out allowed me to catch this wave that, in many ways, I'm still riding. I think the most interesting way to comment on this is what I've learned about life as it is lived versus life as it is depicted in the media. I think what happens when we're consuming media is that we don't necessarily recognize the incentives that are involved.
Ultimately, media is a storytelling business. Even very hard news media, you know? You want these stories to be factual but, ultimately, they're stories. What sells subscriptions and what gets people to watch are the stories. Knowing that the media industry is driven by stories, then you have to ask yourself — What are the elements of a story that make it most marketable and successful?
And what makes a good story is sex, violence, and all these kinds of extreme things. They're the same things that make a Hollywood movie good. So what happens is that when you're consuming the world through media, you're seeing the world through a lens that highlights and skews toward those extremes.
When you have someone going into a country to tell a story, they need to tell a good story to sell newspapers, so they're looking for elements of life being lived that are filled with conflict or violence. What happens is that you get a lot of sensational stories about terrorism or crime.
You form an image of these places that is much more frightening and extreme than you'll find if you get on the ground. If you stop people one-on-one and ask them: "What are you thinking about all day long? We're mostly worried about our families — our son's drug addiction, our father's illness, our wife's struggles with alcohol. On the flip side, there's our daughter's graduation, the person we met and are wildly in love with — these are the stories that represent the life being lived.
First of all, that was all that was available to me, you know? At first, it was just necessity. I was a guy with a camera wanting to be a photographer with no credentials and no experience so I had to work with what was available to me. First, it was just photographing who was on the street, then I started interviewing people on the street, and then I started learning stories from people on the street.
I got very good at that out of necessity. It's realizing that not only the stories of ordinary people hold attention, they can be even more compelling and relatable than stories of public figures and celebrities. It wasn't as a result of me realizing that the stories of ordinary people would be more compelling and then pursuing that path. It was looking for any path — any path — and that was the only path available to me.
In the course of getting very skilled at telling these stories, I realized that their inherent value was massive. This is about six or seven months of just me eating, breathing, and sleeping and doing nothing but photographs. It was all I did, and it was starting to get a little bit of traction.
At the time, I was just getting photos of people, and occasionally, I'd be writing my own caption. One day, I photographed this lady dressed all in green, and the next day I got sick and I couldn't go out and photograph. I was very disciplined at the time, so I had to put something on the blog, and I didn't have anything to post, but I had this picture of the Green Lady. It was a bad picture. I probably wouldn't have posted it otherwise because I really messed it up, but I decided to put it up anyway.
And then, I had remembered that she said something to me: "I used to be a different color every single day, but one day I was green, and that was a great day so I've been green for 15 years.
It was a eureka moment because I realized that people were much more interested in learning about these people than they were in seeing these people. It's been 10 years of maintaining a very large audience on the internet, which is very difficult to do.
It's difficult to hold attention at all on the internet, especially for a sustained amount of time. Looking back on it, one thing that I've always done is that no matter how much I've committed to a path, when I feel the wind blowing a different direction, I'm willing to drop everything and follow that wind. I'll give you an example. I had already signed a contract for my fourth book, which was going to be a book of the remote interviews I've been doing [during the pandemic].
I was going to make a book on that, and I'm working on it, and then Tanqueray happens. I've never seen anybody else do anything like it. Seeing how well it did work made me realize that the audience was engaging with this material in a very deep way. It caught my interest, and I was like, "I think we need to stop this next book, and we've got to figure out how to do a book on Tanqueray. No matter how great one path seems, when another path opens up, you need to immediately drop everything and go down that path.
I've done it multiple times over the last 10 years. I think that's why the blog has existed as long as it has. There's been some valid criticism written about Humans of New York. There's been no criticism that's written about Humans of New York that still applied two years later. The work has always been evolving, morphing, and changing so quickly that you can never pin it down. Humans of New York two years ago was all random. The one variable that I needed most was always time.
I tried to choose as wide of a selection of neighborhoods as possible, but the one thing I needed from everybody was time. These interview take time.
A lot of times they take an hour and a half. They're pretty intense. I've had to learn a lot while doing humans of New York and not just about photography, not just about interviewing, I had to learn what the ethics and best practices were of sharing stories of random individuals that didn't sign up for an interview that I approached on the street with millions of people every single day.
And especially when those stories included very candid admissions, about not only themselves but about other people in their family. The anonymous interview emerged kind of out of that consideration, learning that it's sometimes best even if the person doesn't want to or has no interest in not showing their face, to conceal them, their face to protect them from the ramifications of that sort of exposure.
There's nothing else like it and it didn't even exist. It didn't even exist 15 years ago to have millions of people not only consuming your story, but commenting on it in real time.
It's a very emotionally intense experience. You featured a young man be Donald chest and a and his principal Nadia Lopez, on your blog that led to a visit with President Obama in the Oval Office in With both of them, tell us how that happened. Stanton: Um, organically just like all the other stories on the blog, I was walking in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and there was a young man and it was January is very cold.
So he was like the only one out and I approached him. And one of the questions I asked, I asked him who was influenced you the most in your life? And his answer was my principal. Then he told a little story about her. And then at the end of that, um, we were invited to go to the White House and me the principal Miss Lopez is a power in her own right, and fuddle were given 20 minutes with President Obama. So yeah, it had this wild conclusion. But it started, just like all the other stories, which was a random person on a random street in New York.
One of Time magazine's 30 most influential people on the internet, the author of humans of New York and the sequel, humans of New York stories, Brandon Stanton, man, and thanks for speaking with our friends at the Richmond Forum.
And thank you for visiting us in Richmond and visiting us at VPM. We appreciate it. So you'd spend more time with them. And they tell you to start telling you more about them. So how did the blog then turn into a best selling book? The other is organic, and just springs from curiosity and what the person is saying, when you were doing your blog, how would you set out each day?
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