Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Recently we received an invitation that proved just that.
Social media is a superimposing place where people are usually bragging.
It’s a good poem if I’m a different person when I’m finished reading it.
I don't like to interview people in front of their friends; they clam up.
New York has the biggest, most eclectic collection of people in the world.
I never know what kind of people I'll meet just by stopping to take a photo.
HONY is one of the only things keeping people from getting lost in the matrix.
I think it's important to try to get on a kid's level when taking their photo.
Of all the places I've been, India is the one that's on the top of my list to return to.
Jealousy. Depression. Love. They pretty much demonstrate the whole range of human emotion.
It's such a different spectrum of tragedies when you talk to people in developing countries.
Main thing is just to remember that hard work got me here and only hard work will keep me here.
I didn't actually begin photographing, or even visit New York, for the first time until I was 26.
The most pivotal moments in people's lives revolve around emotions. Emotions make stories powerful.
I don't want to interview people for the purpose of developing a world view and pushing that on people.
In an age of iPhones and Playstations, it's great to see that somebody's still rocking the bus-on-a-string.
I've taken pictures in at least 14 countries, and nowhere have people told me 'no' more than New York City.
The camera adds a certain sheen to things. Something about being frozen in time really makes things sparkle.
If I had sat around and waited until I had an idea to be a successful photographer, I would still be in finance.
I think everyone feels alone in their sadness, and there's a certain value to hearing other people's sad stories.
I don't think there's any better education than learning the intimate details of the lives of people who you most admire.
The media chooses to portray the most extreme and violent aspects of a place. I do the opposite and portray the normality.
I am a huge fan of biographies. What I'm always looking for is a story. I want a story I have never heard from anyone else.
Fortunately, I've done so many interviews that I've become very good at detecting when someone is giving a less-than-candid reply.
'Humans of New York' did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.
My two biggest lessons learned as a trader are take risks and get comfortable with taking losses and setbacks to help move you forward.
Don't wait for perfect. Don't wait for something to be fully formed in your head to start on it. Just start, and then work it out as you go.
It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
As an artist in the 21st century, my two goals are to make the best work that I can, improve as much as I can, and to distribute that work as far as I can.
There are so many people that use 'following your dreams' as an excuse to not work. When in reality, following your dreams, successfully, is nothing but work.
Interviewing someone is a very proactive process and requires taking a lot of agency into your own hands to get past people's general normal self-preservation mode.
It seems that everywhere I go, people want the same things - security, education, family. It's just that so many people have no avenues through which to obtain these things.
Without social media, I'd probably just be a quirky, amateur photographer with a hard drive full of photos. I'd be cold calling respected publications, begging for a feature.
Being a doctor, lawyer in war-torn countries isn't easy when the infrastructure isn't there. The money, the food and education is not always accessible to achieve those dreams.
I never buy plane tickets out of a country until I'm in the country, so I get on the ground, figure out what I need, where I'm going, how much time I need, and schedule as I go along.
A lot of the children I photograph are extremely colorfully dressed in some way. But I also find a lot of kids with outsized personalities or who happen to be doing something charming.
I struck upon this kind of crazy idea that I was going to go to New York and stop 10,000 people on the streets and take their portrait and create kind of a photographic census of the city.
I'm a believer in the ordinary person, that the ordinary person is just as important and has an equally unique perspective on the world as someone who is famous or perhaps more privileged.
I get way too sensitive when I get attached to someone. I can detect the slightest change in the tone of their voice, and suddenly I’m spending all day trying to figure out what I did wrong.
When I meet somebody in the street who knows about 'Humans of New York,' a lot of times they might have a scripted answer, and that scripted answer is the first thing to come out of their mouth.
'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.
My interviews are very pointed. I'm an active participant; I will kindly interrupt people. But I've learned there is nothing people won't tell you if you ask in a compassionate and legitimately interested way.
I always say that my favorite people to interview are the people who are at the beginning and the ends of their lives because they have two alternate perspectives of the world, and neither of them are less profound.
Whenever you get a large body of work like 'Humans of New York,' a natural pathway becomes to put it between two covers. I wanted this to be a very nice keepsake. A lot of work went into it, and a lot of fans are attached to it.
I am interviewing people with a spirit of genuine interest and compassion, and therefore, the general tone of the site is one of genuine interest and compassion. The moment that culture changes, 'Humans of New York' is no longer viable.
It's the rejection that is hard. It's not the interviewing that's hard. It's not the photography that's hard. It's, you know, approaching people all day long and having a good portion of those people reject you and some of them be rude.
People always say be true to yourself. But that’s misleading, because there are two selves. There’s your short term self, and there’s your long term self. And if you’re only true to your short term self, your long term self slowly decays.
'Humans of New York' is basically somebody walking up to absolute strangers on the street every day and, within minutes, talking with them about very personal things. Some things they haven't even told their best friends or family members.
Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.
When I first started 'Humans of New York,' I was writing short stories. There were about 50 of them. And, you know, they were a great part of the site, but the photography just started growing so fast that I didn't have time to make them anymore.