Photographers

Brandon Stanton (born March 1, 1984, in Marietta, Georgia) is an internationally celebrated American street portrait photographer, journalist, and digital archivist who completely revolutionized the landscapes of internet visual culture, narrative photojournalism, and crowdsourced humanitarian activism. Stanton pursued formal training in history, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Georgia in 2008. Following a brief, turbulent career as a bond trader in Chicago, he was abruptly laid off during the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2010. This turning point prompted him to purchase his first semi-professional camera, a Canon EOS 7D, and relocate to New York City with no professional connections or industry training. Rather than using his camera to capture idealized architectural landmarks or elite commercial fashion, Stanton approached the street from a deeply humanistic, documentary perspective, viewing the ordinary residents of the metropolis as an expansive, living repository of shared human experiences.

Stanton achieved monumental critical and global institutional acclaim when he conceived and launched his digital storytelling project, Humans of New York (HONY), in November 2010. Initially designed to build an open-source visual map of ten thousand New Yorkers plotted on an interactive city map, his methodology transformed dramatically when he began pairing his street portraits with deeply personal, candid text captions. Using extreme patience, active listening, and a disciplined interviewing technique, Stanton developed an unparalleled ability to quickly dismantle the self-consciousness of absolute strangers, prompting them to share intimate oral histories concerning grief, addiction, love, and systemic vulnerability. This process-driven intervention turned HONY into a global media phenomenon, attracting tens of millions of active daily subscribers across social media platforms. His continuous visual archiving resulted in consecutive number-one New York Times bestselling book volumes, including Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and his monumental compilation Humans (2020), which mapped street narratives across over forty global countries.

Operating at the cutting edge of digital visual sociology and interactive philanthropy, Stanton has consistently scaled his platform to orchestrate massive crowdsourced humanitarian campaigns. Through targeted multi-day storytelling features, his platform has raised tens of millions of dollars for global causes, including establishing collegiate scholarship funds, supporting international medical relief, and funding grassroots non-profits. His active practice extended fluidly into the mid-2020s through high-impact investigative visual series and broadcast documentary specials that challenge traditional media formats. Stanton has been officially recognized as one of Time Magazine’s Next Generation Leaders and has been invited to deliver keynote addresses at premier global arenas, including the United Nations and Harvard University. His master digital prints, comprehensive social registries, and extensive narrative archives are preserved across leading digital repositories and media history collections, establishing his legacy as the premier pioneer of twenty-first-century internet-based human archiving.