A photograph captures a fleeting moment in time, preserving it forever. Within a photograph, a whole world exists, only frozen in that one second. As society clings onto fading memories, a photograph can be the thousand words everyone needs in order to remember. Though photographs are printed less onto paper and more onto phone or computer screens, the everlasting instant they contain can define humanity at its best or its worst. Contributing to the history of humanist photography, Richard Renaldi and Brandon Stanton are two Americans who have tapped into the iconic tradition of street photography to document the ever changing social aspects of the world around them. Taking inspiration from works in the past, the photographers capture the vision of artists like Edward Steichen, whose goal was to ‘explain man to man’ (Reznik, 2013). Although their works are exhibited in different places and present different people, they have a similar fascination with challenging us to stop and look. All around us there are memories that do not exist to us, and these photographers focus on the strangers many would never know.
Brandon Stanton is a celebrated photographer who moved to New York city to pursue his passion for imagery. In the summer of 2010, he began the ‘Humans of New York’ (HONY) project that has since developed into a significant collection of work. ‘I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of New York’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map’, Stanton recalled. However, his project became so much more than mapping out the people of New York; it became a quest to discover more... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Richard Renaldi, Andre & Elizabeth.
