Jimmy's Favorite Blog - Humans of New York (and Beyond)

It does not take an excessive amount of insight to see why Human of New York is a website that is appealing on a massive scale.

Having accrued over 9.5 million fans on Facebook, Humans of New York is the brainchild of street-photographer Brandon Stanton, an ex-bond trader who quit trading when it suddenly went south in the summer of 2010. He moved to New York and began taking photographs of strangers on the street, eventually incorporating an interview aspect into his work and asking both broad and personal questions of his subjects so that their portraits might be accompanied with a quote or two on his burgeoning blog and Facebook Page. Over the last four years, his blog and page have grown in exponential amounts, and feature people of all walks of life, social statuses and belief systems opening up to a white man with a camera on the streets of the Big Apple.

Fast-forward to 2014 and you come to the reason that I love this blog and page. This past summer, Brandon and a team of interpreters have been recruited by the United Nations to go on tour into conflict zones, cities and underrepresented lands across the world (well...ten countries). This provides the casual American, such as myself, whom wonders about different peoples across the world but is too lazy to learn different languages in order to get to know said peoples, an incredible opportunity to hear the stories and see the faces of a great many people.

While the questions are sometimes generic and the comment section infuriatingly naive ("they are just like us" crops up a few too many times), there is something powerful in the simple way Brandon portrays his subjects. He chooses pretty short quotes usually, and while that can serve almost as propaganda in portraying a subject (a single line of dialogue and a freeze frame in time), he is at least getting into places and talking with people that I haven't had the opportunity to get into and speak with. With the United Nations tour in full force, I log onto Facebook now with an excitement to see where Brandon has travelled and what amazing people he has had the opportunity to speak with.

You could say I'm unbelievably jealous.