dimanche 27 octobre 2013

Humans Of New York

Il y a longtemps que je n’ai pas trouvé un blog qui m’enthousiasme autant. Il faut aller voir et lire intégralement Humans Of New York.
Un livre, recueil des images du blog — what else? — vient de sortir.
L’auteur du blog, Brandon Stanton se raconte un peu dans le New York Times cette semaine :
Brandon Stanton, the man behind the documentary photo blog Humans of New York, has just released his first book — also called “Humans of New York” — and it makes its debut on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 1. Stanton, a 29-year-old Georgia native, started photographing strangers in 2010 after finding his way to New York from Chicago, where he had recently lost his job as a bond trader. “My mom basically thought this was my glorified way of not working,” he told ABC’s “Nightline” last month. “Like, oh, Brandon’s in New York taking pictures of people on the street and putting them on Facebook, you know what I mean?” That description isn’t far off the mark, actually. But it misses the primal voyeuristic appeal of Stanton’s blog, which only increased after he started interviewing his subjects and including short quotations or anecdotes with their portraits. (“Q. Where are you from? A. Russia. If you see a doctor smoking, he’s from Russia.”)
“I stopped looking for the most colorful and odd and just went to anyone I would come across on a bench,” Stanton recently told The Chicago Tribune, which rightly identified the project’s variety as a source of its charm. Here’s how the reporter, Christopher Borrelli, described Stanton’s book: “Children, hipsters, pet owners, businessmen, matadors, puppeteers, students — it’s a kind of Burpee seed catalog of humanity.”