Selena Truong ASTU 100A

Humans of New York (HONY) was initially Brandon Stanton’s photography project but eventually involved into much more. It is now an archival site that portrays mini biographies of people along the street in order to get a glimpse of the individualities of people within a larger group. By bringing the personal to the public, HONY works to show how our small individual lives and characteristics make up a large community. HONY focuses their stories on people who narrate stories about working towards social change or being change makers, being victims of social inequality, or simply coming to an epiphany or telling an inspirational aspect of their lives. However, as much as an overlooking description of these stories may seem as though they are all “fluff”, in reality, they can be quite the opposite. At times, HONY reminds us that life narratives aren’t always about pleasing the audience and doing the “ethical” thing—they are about reflecting the reality of our lives, even if telling the truth isn’t comforting. By doing this, they are contributing to an archive that works to portray a group of people of a certain time and place. Archives help us understand communities of the past, and in this work, even the unsettling stories have value for our attempts to understand the social problems that exist at a certain time. A story that I will examine out of HONY is one that exemplifies the type of story that is unsettling to the promoted mainstream and “ideal” values that exist in modern day culture, but is frighteningly quite spot on to the underlying values of society that are prominent and exist, but are unacknowledged and often brushed aside from our “perfect ideals”.

This post that I will discuss is accompanied with a faceless picture of a woman’s hands resting together on her knees as she sits on a bench in what looks like a subway station in New York. She is Caucasian and wearing black nail polish and the tone of the photo seems cold and tense. In her biography, she explains that her mother has been “really sick for 50 to 60 percent of [her] life” as she ended up in a psychiatric ward after her husband left and had breast cancer twice. The woman explains that this was a lot of pressure on her as she was her mother’s only child and she would have to come home from school to “pick [her] mother up off the bathroom floor” instead of playing at the playground with friends. The woman continues to explain that as she is newly married, her mother is still very sick and reliant on her as she is expected by her mother to do a list of errands for her every day after work and to call and visit her in the hospital every few days. The common and idealist expectation that the dominant society would have at this point would be that the mother is very appreciative of her daughter and that the daughter is happy to be there for her mother who raised her. However, the woman explains that if she does not visit her mother for a few days her mother will call her “selfish” and tell her to not return. The woman is starting a family, and states that she “[doesn’t] know what [she] [wants] to happen” but she is at the point where she would “like some freedom to live [her] life” (Stanton).

As a reader, I had some conflicting thoughts. As I was able to sympathize with the woman who narrated, I understood her desire for some “freedom”. However, I found that my sympathy for her was unsettling. With my own personal values and the “ideal” values for our dominant society, it would seem selfish to abandon the person who raised you simply because you’re starting not to need them anymore. However, this also makes me reflect on the individualistic values of the West in general. In North America in this day in age, society and media often put value on the “self”. This, therefore, as an archive, allows for reflection on this individualistic value that is present at this time. This woman’s biography for HONY is an example of a result of this value and how it affects specific people’s choices and thinking during this time period. If it weren’t for the unsettling honesty of this woman’s narrative in the archive, and for the archive in general, the only aspect of society that future generations would be able to look back on to analyze society would be the sugar coated, idealistic and distorted reality that is presented in the media instead of what is truly representative of what makes up the collective values and actions of a community.

Work Cited

Stanton, Brandon. Humans of New York. www.humansofnewyork.com/post/154692913631/my-mom-has-been-really-sick-for-50-to-60-percent. Accessed 1 February 2017.