A photography Census
Humans of New York was started by Stanton in the summer of 2010 as a photography project. The initial aim was to catalogue the diversity of New York City by collecting the portraits of ten thousand New Yorkers and plotting those photos on an interactive map of the city. Importantly, these portraits were collected by stopping random people on the street-- establishing a unique combination of anonymity and intimacy that would define all future iterations of Humans of New York.
From Portraits To Interviews
In the course of collecting these portraits, Stanton began having short conversations with his subjects. He published quotes from these conversations alongside each portrait, and these interactions soon became the focal point of the work itself. This innovation coincided with the dawn of social media, and ‘HONY’ began to rapidly explode in popularity as a source of real, honest, and often surprising conversations with random people on the streets of New York City. The project quickly became, in the words of New York Magazine, ‘the biggest thing on the internet.” In 2013 the first book was released: Humans of New York, which instantly became a #1 NYT bestseller.
Going Deeper
Over the next few years, Stanton conversations with his subjects evolved into lengthy interviews. The small quotes grew into longer stories: sometimes funny, sometimes philosophical, sometimes tragic. The second book Humans of New York: Stories was released in 2015. During this time Humans of New York expanded to feature extensive series on marginalized groups such as refugees and federal inmates. In 2015 Stanton was invited to The White House by the Obama administration, becoming the first social media creator to photograph and interview a president in the Oval Office.
An International Project
HUMANS
In 2013 Stanton created his first international series during a two-week trip to Iran. With the aid of an interpreter, he collected portraits and quotes from randomly-selected Iranians on the streets of several cities. Later that year he partnered with the United Nations for a world tour in support of the Millenium Development Goals, which featured stories from twelve different countries including Iraq, South Sudan, and The Democratic Republic of Congo. Over the next several years Humans of New York would feature stories collected on the streets of 40 different countries. In 2020 the work from these travels was turned into a book called Humans.
Over the past 15 years, in the course of creating Humans of New York, Stanton has photographed and interviewed over ten thousand people around the world. During this time Humans of New York has raised $20 million for various people and causes featured on the platform. The project has continued to expand in scope and depth, and over the past several years has featured many multi-chapter longform stories. One of these, Tanqueray, would become the fourth #1 NYT Bestseller to emerge from Humans of New York. The Washington Post described Tanqueray as ‘A beautiful, sometimes shocking NC-17 story, kept out of the lily-white, upper crust canon of literature―until now.’”
Fifteen Years of Stories
Dear New York,
In October 2025, the final collection of portraits and stories from Humans of New York was published in Stanton’s latest book, Dear New York. The book was released alongside an immersive art installation created by Stanton, which transformed New York’s Grand Central Station into a celebration of the diversity of New York City. Experienced by several million people over its two-week run, Dear New York was by some accounts the most-viewed public work in history.