November 27, 2015
While scrolling Facebook, its quite common to come across all sorts of posts, pages, and videos. Perhaps including a couple of politically enthusiastic rants, adorably addicting cat videos, and even purely humanitarian pages designed solely for the benefit of mankind. The popular "Humans of New York" page is one of these humanitarian pages, created by a New York native named Brandon in efforts to tell the stories of people in his great city.
Along with their sometimes lengthy captions, the photographs that Brandon captures are stunning, in a sense that they're completely human. It seems elementary, but capturing absolute human emotion is an extremely difficult task. The emphasis on this woman is extraordinary, by focusing the lens on her instead of the background, and by having a background that is mainly black and white. If this picture were a paragraph, the woman would be a sentence of vivid adjectives and unique sentence structure among a blob of repetitive "potato chip" style English.
This drastic emphasis on her obviously genuine happiness is what makes Brandon so successful. His main purpose is to give hope to all types of Americans, no matter what situation we are in. He simultaneously gives his audience a rich perspective, that while walking through the streets of New York, or any city, there are stories like these everywhere. The caption of this particular photograph was entirely made up of this woman talking about her battle with depression, yet in this picture, it looks like she is the happiest woman on earth. By capturing this moment of juxtaposition, Brandon proves that even though life may seem tough, there are always ways to be optimistic. This gives his audience a humbling sense of happiness and by incorporating pictures like these throughout his page, he reinforces time and time again the amazing stories of what may seem like the average New York person.
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