The internet community has known about photographer Brandon Stanton — or at least his internationally famous photoblog Humans of New York — for a while now, but this week President Obama got to meet the man behind the cultural phenomenon. The invitation was extended to Stanton after the president had learned about his recent display of social activism, raising over one million dollars for Mott Hall Bridges Academy of Brooklyn, NY, in under two weeks. And it was one of his "Humans of New York" that inspired it all.
His blog hasn't lost any momentum since he started it on an artistic whim back in 2010. But what began as a personal photography project to take 10,000 portraits of random New Yorkers has evolved into an interactive redefining of New York City's cultural identity, an ongoing anthropological study of unprecedented scale. And although this wasn't what Stanton initially had in mind, he let himself be guided by the sociological potential of the project — the celebration of the individual as a constituent of the collective entity on a public stage — by developing his own unique photojournalistic techniques in an effort to collect material as effectively as possible. In his own words, his project has become about taking "fear and strangeness and uncomfortableness, and turning that into an atmosphere of intimacy, where people feel comfortable to disclose in a very short amount of time."
And before long, his portraits were being posted onto his blog with a short anecdote or quote attached to them, giving an evocative glimpse into the life of whichever "Human of New York" found themselves on the celebratory stage that Stanton had created for them — an idea so simple and effective in its ability to spark interest that even Obama was impressed.
But there are many times when Stanton's Humans of New York enters sentimental territory — and it's on that slippery slope where one of the more recent performers on Stanton's stage finds himself. Meet Vidal, a young student attending Brownsville's Mott Hall Bridges Academy, the reason all of us who have donated chose to care:
Stanton stopped him in the same way he has stopped nearly six thousand others — an "atmosphere of intimacy" was created, a perceived revelation of character was duly noted, and a portrait was candidly taken. And that's how it usually works with HONY, a process which imbues each of Stanton's posts with its own heightened emotional quality. The light and airy beauty of happiness is showcased often enough, but when heavier topics — i.e. alcoholism, rape, loss, depression, and addiction — are found in Stanton's quest for immediate intimacy, our real feelings start to come out of the woodwork. But how do we choose to show them? We comment, and then scroll on.
That's one of the biggest problems with HONY: the encouragement of hollow sentimentality in lieu of substantive activism. Everyone who comments on its posts gets to feel morally accomplished by doing essentially nothing, as if feigned recognition of a societal issue would invoke any real change. A simple comment makes followers feel like they were a part of the struggle even if they hadn't lived it or anything similar themselves — even if they would otherwise do nothing to support an end to that struggle or others like it.
In this way, HONY only seems to support what can be considered the sentimental appropriation of personal struggle — because no single portrait could really show us the whole picture.
In observing his carelessness in the face of social issues, I began to see Stanton as just another hollow sentimentalist, as one who hid behind his lens (just as the audience hides behind their comments), isolating his subjects into perfectly consumable little blog posts of apolitical "human-ness" — unknowingly predisposing them to the dangers of sentimentality. And when I read a very well-written critique on Humans of New York by Melissa Smyth, I began to understand what had been subtly irking me about the stage Stanton had created with HONY: too often would the sentimentality that surrounded it override the actual need to address the deeper systemic issues at the heart of each subject's personal ones.
The problem with sentimentality here is not the infusion of emotion into a political issue; on the contrary, it is the funneling of emotion into mute forms, preventing the marriage of thought and feeling that produces the most concentrated social action.
Using "a particular photograph of [an allegedly] fabricated moment," Smyth argues strongly against Stanton and HONY, calling out all the ways in which his methods of cataloguing inhabitants of New York in the project inadvertently enable its consumers to be wholly satisfied with sentimentality alone.
Censorship was one such method: the moderation of a HONY post's comment section and the swift deletion of any controversial comments that sought to criticize that post's subject (even when made within the scope of social awareness) were part of a policy which ultimately resulted in the silencing of one member's voice in particular, NYU grad student Brianna Cox.
I had thought her initial comment — expressing her disappointment with the implicit racism being blindly perpetuated by a teacher in Harlem who thought most of his students lacked a "culture of expectation" at home — was rather thought-provoking: "A 'culture of expectation' is hard when you are in a 'culture of I work 16 hours a day.'"
Yet the majority of the commenters seemed to disagree with her, responding to her criticism dismissively with typical "race card" rhetoric, and with the claimed purpose of protecting the subject of the photo, her comment was deleted. But it is the public's reaction to her comment, and its participation in a form of cultural censorship, which is most important to note when discussing the dangers of being exclusively sentimental — of separating subject from environment, event from historical relevance, and fact from feeling.
Because even when it acts to protect the emotional welfare of Stanton's performers, HONY's policy of censorship becomes problematic if — as a consequence of that protection — it leaves sentimentality unchecked.
With that in mind, I'd like you to meet another one of Stanton's performers: the principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy — yes, it's Ms. Lopez. The Ms. Lopez. The beautiful soul who indirectly touched the hearts of more than one million people through a single HONY post, our sentimentality slowly redirecting the conversation towards her personal [very admirable] actions and away from the larger issue at hand: the systematic oppression that marginalized communities face in America, and more specifically, how to deal with that as a child stuck in an education system that isn't designed to help you. Stanton's now internationally famous portrait of Vidal did more to generate sentiment than it did to attack the system which is causing the hardship that students like him face today.
That the bulk of the comments mentioned appreciation for the "existence of people like Ms. Lopez" yet failed to also appreciate the brevity of the situation — that Mott Hall Bridges Academy isn't the only school in NYC facing these problems, much less in the whole country — only seemed to validate my fear that HONY was creating a space where social discussion would ultimately be met with a slow, sentimental demise, eradicating the possibility of any positive social change.
But then, the situation with the student and the principal took an unexpected turn — and the doubts I had about the possibility of achieving any tangible results with the project dissipated — when Humans of New York became an instigator of social activism, starting a fundraiser for the school by accepting donations from its followers to help support the administration and their mission.
As it turned out, soon after taking the picture of the student, Stanton organized a meeting with Ms. Lopez to come up with a way in which he could be of help to her efforts in providing more resources to the students. In that meeting, they came up with this fundraiser in order to fund a school-wide trip to Harvard University, in an attempt to contribute to the "culture of expectation" that the students weren't experiencing by living in a neighborhood like Brownsville.
In one of the initial updates to the Indiegogo campaign, the principal explained that they "have a major need for a summer program" — how she tried to fund a similar program herself last summer but couldn't due to all too familar education budget cuts, and that any further donations will only further her ability to keep the children in a safe and educationally enriching environment. At this point in the fundraiser, they've raised enough money to fund not only the summer program and annual trips to Harvard, but even to start their own scholarship fund — all because of Stanton and his work with HONY. His decision to take his sentimental feelings and use them as an impetus to incite social change has made Ms. Lopez's dream a reality for Mott Hall Bridges Academy.
But are we really seeing the whole picture here? Or is our sentimentality getting in the way? While it warms my heart to no end that there are those out there in the world creating positive change, we cannot depend solely on people like Stanton or Ms. Lopez; we can't allow their change to be the only change we see in the world, because it isn't enough. Because funding this one school isn't enough — that's only one pixel of a much bigger portrait.
Yes, the activism displayed by HONY recently may be heroic, but it doesn't mean that it should not also be looked at critically; even American heroes (like Chris Kyle, the subject of recent controversy surrounding Eastwood's American Sniper) should not be above critique. While the change it has brought about for these children is positive, it is also too sentimental — hollow change. It's alleviating a symptom without even diagnosing the disease, a disease which very recent events have shown us can even lead to death. And the state of primary education in this country is just that — deadly.
If we want anything to really change, then we have to stop enabling ourselves to only be sentimental — to separate ourselves from what is happening around us. It's such separation that allows most of us to keep living the way we do: completely unfazed by it all, giving a little bit of money to a fundraiser and thinking that's good enough.
We need to stop letting our feelings blind us from reality and over-sensitize our reception of criticism; we need to give substance to our sentimentality. But if the world-famous photographer Brandon Stanton can harness its power and use Humans of New York as a springboard for positive change, then why can't we all do the same? Are we not also humans ourselves?
Images: Facebook/Humans of New York (7)
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