Brandon Stanton, creator, writer, and photographer of the world-renowned blog, Humans of New York will be speaking at the University of Florida on Dec. 9 at an event hosted by ACCENT Speakers Bureau.
After working for three years as a bonds trader in Chicago, Stanton moved to New York in hopes of creating an exhaustive catalogue of New York City’s inhabitants, including photographs of 10,000 New Yorkers and plotting their locations on a map. After founding Humans of New York in November of 2010, the photo blog took on a much different character as Stanton began collecting quotes and short stories from the people he met and incorporated these snippets alongside his photographs.
Today, Humans of New York has a worldwide audience of over sixteen million people on Facebook. Taken together, Stanton’s portraits and captions provide his blog’s followers with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City. More recently, Stanton has taken his approach to nearly 20 countries and provided the world with a closer glimpse of individuals entering Europe seeking refuge from their war-torn homelands.
In 2013, Stanton’s first book, a compilation of the stories and pictures he collected in the Big Apple, became a #1 New York Times bestseller. Later that year, Stanton was named one of Time Magazine’s 30 Under 30 People Changing the World. In 2015, Stanton and Humans of New York interviewed President Barack Obama. Stanton’s most recent book “HONY: Stories” debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestselling list of nonfiction books.
