“It was the process that was important,” Stanton said of Humans of New York, “not the idea.” Christian Wiloejo/The Fordham Ram
By Katie Meyer and Joe Vitale
Spring Weekend events began with a bang Thursday evening with Campus Activities Board’s (CAB) featured speaker Brandon Stanton, creator of the popular photography blog Humans of New York and author of a book of the same name.
An hour before the event was set to start in Lombardi Field house, a line of students wrapped all the way from the door, past the McGinley Center. It soon passed Keating Hall as well.
After an introduction from CAB’s Emily Oliver, FCRH ’17, and Luke Palmer, GSB ’16, who together coordinated the event, Stanton made his way to the stage and kicked off his speech by marveling at the size of the crowd. “I feel like I’m leading a pep rally,” he said, before leading a “call on the spirit of Vince Lombardi.”
After the laughs died down, Stanton shifted into the main part of his speech: the story of how Humans of New York came to be.
It was a process, he said.
Stanton started out his professional career, not as a photographer, but as a Chicago-based bond trader. He said that the job, which he landed shortly after graduating the University of Georgia, went well for a while, and he made a lot of money.
But then, he said, it went downhill quickly, and he was fired.
So he started over. He had recently become interested in photography, and had bought a camera as a release from work. He started taking pictures full time around the streets of Chicago. At first they were not of people, but of trees or buildings, which he encouraged his trader friends to purchase.
He said he still clearly remembers the first time he ever photographed humans; in particular, he remembers how scared he was, how intimidating it was to take a picture of strangers. But he got over the fear and took the picture. He posted it on Facebook, where it got zero likes and one comment. But, he said, that was enough. Something had clicked.
“From that moment on,” he said,” I just took pictures of people.”
Eventually Stanton decided to move to New York City, with a vague plan of taking ten thousand photos of people and plotting them on a map. That is the project that eventually turned into Humans of New York.
Stanton noted that, “if I had set out to make Humans of New York, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“It was the process that was important,” he said, “not the idea.”
He started taking photos every day, became more skilled and eventually started adding captions.
With the addition of those captions, those little peeks into the complexity of strangers’ lives, Stanton said the blog really found itself. And that, he said, is why it became so successful. The captions, and his own ability to get those intimate quotes from strangers, are what he “does differently.”
“It’s more important to be different to be good,” he said. “It’s important to do both, But it’s more important to be different.”
Stanton also offered advice to other people who might want to do something “outside of the box.” At first, he said, when you try something different, there will be a period of time where everyone you know thinks you are delusional. But the important thing, he stressed, is commitment.
“The only thing you can control is how hard you work,” he said. “The rest you can’t control.”
Stanton also invited a student up onto the stage, so he could demonstrate his interview tactics. With the help of Amanda Reed, FCRH ’18, Stanton explained how people are reluctant to open up at first. He starts with general questions, then slowly gets more personal, more specific. And he says that as he does so, people get more comfortable.
In an Instagram post regarding the event, CAB thanked Stanton, calling his talk “one of our most highly attended events ever.”
This high attendance created a few complications for CAB prior to the event, which were highlighted in an opinion column in The Ram, which questioned the location of the lecture, suggesting that, “a blurry distinction” was at the heart of the issue.
The article stated that only 500 people would be able to attend the lecture, though the McGinley Ballroom, in addition to an adjacent lounge, would accommodate 1,100 people. The author proceeded to question the decision by student leaders and administrators, given the amount of students who were “attending” the event on Facebook.
The column also stated that moving the event would require CAB to pay $10,000 to Fordham Athletics, though the payment was actually for equipment rentals (which included chairs and staging supplies) and would not be given to the Athletic Department.
On Thursday, CAB posted on social media that the event to the Lombardi Field House, which occupies far more students.
Some of the original information, supplied by Nick Giampiccolo, a co-chair of Special Events handling the DJ event of Spring Weekend, was factually incorrect, according to other club officials.
In an email to The Fordham Ram, CAB president Natalie Salerno said Giampiccolo was “in no way…involved with the planning or logistics of American Age Spring Weekend lecture.”
Salerno added that, given her comprehensive view of all the Spring Weekend events, “this year’s Spring Weekend planning has gone more smoothly than past years.”
By the time the event started, the space problems were ironed out. A stage was set up in the Lombardi center, well over a thousand students were seated and the event generated a flurry of buzz online.
Along with dozens of posts on social media by students, a short clip of the event was featured on Snapchat’s New York City “Our Story,” a continuous live channel of things happening in New York City.
In addition, a post on the Facebook page for Humans for Fordham University — a derivative of Stanton’s own successful blog — that featured a photo of Stanton in the McGinley Center received more than 860 likes.
“Tables have tuned,” the caption stated. “Thanks for the inspiration.”
