Humans of New York and ethical reflections in the digital age

Abstract

The massive global success of the Humans of New York blog presents a view of the world which transcends our individual differences and allows a feeling of universal human connection. Yet, this feeling of universality often simplifies other forces at work, particularly masking structural patterns of exploitation or oppression. This article examines the ethical dimensions of the blog, specifically focusing on photos of Syrian refugees as presented to a Western audience.

The Humans of New York (HONY) blog was founded by Brandon Stanton in 2010, shortly after Stanton moved to New York City after working as a bond trader in Chicago. He began walking through the city, initially with the goal of taking 10,000 portraits and creating a photographic map of New York. He posted the photos to his website and to social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. Over the next few months and years, he developed a following which grew into the thousands, tens, and hundreds of thousands, then millions. Stanton’s first book, published in 2013, was called Humans of New York and featured photos of individuals sometimes accompanied by a short description or quote. As he continued photographing and talking to people, he also began asking more detailed questions and recording their answers, posting the photo as before, but now accompanied by short stories. At the time of this writing, HONY had millions of followers, with current Facebook followers alone numbering well over 17 million. A typical post on Facebook might have several hundred thousand likes, even into the millions, as well as thousands of shares, and tens of thousands of comments.

Like many of his followers online, my interest in HONY grew as I saw the images and read the accompanying stories and began looking forward to seeing his posts appear on Facebook or Instagram. People in the photos talked about their lives, their families, their jobs, their relationships, their struggles with loneliness or joy, finding or losing love, having or losing children, and their memories of war or friendship. Each post was a powerful narrative moment, a portrait of the person and a small glimpse into their lives. Some of the stories and images stay with me, people I don’t know and will never meet, yet who I often think about:

Shortly after we were married, I got tuberculosis and rashes broke out all over my body. They smelled so bad that I had to be cleaned three times a day. She always made me fresh food and made sure I had clean clothes every time I bathed. One morning, during this time, she asked me: “Would you do the same if I got sick?” I promised her: “I’ll do even more.” She died a few years ago from a brain tumor. She was in bed for the last three years of her life. Toward the end, she couldn’t identify people. Water from her brain would drain from her eyes. I ran home from the shop three times a day to help her go to the bathroom. I was always sure to turn her. She never had a single bedsore. In the end, the doctor told me: “It would not have been possible to take better care of her.” Karachi, Pakistan. (Stanton, 2015a)

I often thought about this story when it was posted in early August of 2015, of his relationship with his wife, and what it might have meant to him to lose her. This story was posted during Stanton’s overseas travel in the summer of 2015, where he spent time in Pakistan and Iran, and later in Greece and southern Europe where he spoke with Syrian refugees making their way to Europe. I followed all his posts, as families recounted harrowing stories of escape, of fear and violence, of kindness along the way, of the situations they left behind, and the situations they faced moving forward. Many stories were incredibly moving and memorable, although I most often thought of the woman in the caption below:

My husband and I sold everything we had to afford the journey. We worked 15 hours a day in Turkey until we had enough money to leave. The smuggler put 152 of us on a boat. Once we saw the boat, many of us wanted to go back, but he told us that anyone who turned back would not get a refund. We had no choice. Both the lower compartment and the deck were filled with people. Waves began to come into the boat so the captain told everyone to throw their baggage into the sea. In the ocean we hit a rock, but the captain told us not to worry. Water began to come into the boat, but again he told us not to worry. We were in the lower compartment and it began to fill with water. It was too tight to move. Everyone began to scream. We were the last ones to get out alive. My husband pulled me out of the window. In the ocean, he took off his life jacket and gave it to a woman. We swam for as long as possible. After several hours he told me he that he was too tired to swim and that he was going to float on his back and rest. It was so dark we could not see. The waves were high. I could hear him calling me but he got further and further away. Eventually a boat found me. They never found my husband. Kos, Greece. (Stanton, 2015b)

After following the series of posts about people escaping the violence in Syria, I followed the link on the HONY website directing people to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR; the United Nations Refugee Agency) to donate money toward the UNHCR’s work in assisting refugees. Among my own Facebook community, several people shared HONY’s images of refugees (including the post reproduced above; which on Facebook has 881,000 “likes,” 289,000 shares, and nearly 73,000 comments) or asked about the best way to help, and others posted suggestions as well as links to donate money to organizations working with refugees. HONY partnered with Kickstarter (a website based on crowd-sourced fundraising) and the White House for a donation campaign benefitting the UNHCR. The end of the 1-week-long campaign showed donations by over 27,000 people with USD1.77 million raised (The UN Refugee Agency, 2015).

Apart from Stanton’s regular posts of people in New York City, the images and stories about refugees presented a side of the story that was not commonly available from other sources. Among news reports of the number of people leaving Syria, of the dangers of crossing from Turkey to Greece in rafts, or the political and economic ramifications of the influx of people to European countries, the stories of the individuals making that trip seemed to be lost. Particularly in the United States, there is a raging debate over whether and how to admit refugees—many news outlets and politicians seem to agree that it should be a relatively small number, with some stoking fears of terrorism linked to the monolithic labels of the “refugee” and the “Muslim.” Further news reports featured images of Americans protesting the admittance of refugees, as well as protests against the refusal to accept refugees (Llamas, 2015), and a prominent far-right political figure threatened to ban not only all refugees but all Muslims from entering the country (Healy & Barbaro, 2015). Yet where does HONY fit into this? How might the individual stories and images he posts of people seeking refuge affect his millions of followers? How does the image of a Muslim woman sharing the story of trying to escape violence and losing her husband influence how Western audiences respond to the refugee crisis?

Anthropological debates and ethics in the digital age

With HONY, Stanton taps into a long-standing anthropological question of how, and what it means, to humanize the “other.” Yet the tensions inherent in this question are exponentially magnified by digital platforms with audiences of millions of people. Perhaps audiences see these photos and stories and connect with something greater than themselves, finding an unexpected moment of shared experience with a stranger. In particular, they might see these unknown individuals as filled with the same hopes, desires, and love as themselves. It allows for the belief in a universal human experience, a shared understanding of what it means to be a parent, to lose a partner, to struggle at work, and to feel lonely. Each post is a powerful narrative moment, a portrait of the person, and a small glimpse into their lives. It allows us to transcend, even momentarily, the divisiveness and difference that keep people apart. This is a perspective frequently repeated, both from Stanton himself, and across reviews, media, and news reports about HONY. Yet what it means to transcend differences, and for whom, is a debate that stretches to the earliest origins of anthropology and the practice of ethnography.

The assumptions of universality contained in the idea of transcending difference collapse the specifics of who speaks and who hears. The claim to represent the “universal,” which is intended to broaden the reach and depth of a work, can often be that which limits and constrains it; the “universal” inevitably reveals itself to be a particular cultural subgroup asserting dominance over others. Considering ethics in anthropology, Marilyn Strathern (1987) writes,

Whether the prime factors are the colonial relations between the societies from which both anthropologists and informants come or the use to which the text will be put, the social worlds of anthropologist and informant are different. They have no interests in common to be served by this purportedly common product. (p. 290)

These questions come quickly to the fore when considering Stanton’s trip to Iraq in 2014, while ongoing blasts from the US forces, intended to target the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), were also terrorizing the local population. What neo-colonial forces were at work in Stanton’s interviews with Iraqi subjects? To what use will the photos and stories on his blog be put? Can there be any shared interest or goals between Stanton and the Iraqi citizens in that kind of text? In one photo, an anguished older Iraqi man looks at the viewer, as a younger man moves to put an arm around him, or perhaps to shield him from the gaze of the camera and the onslaught of questions. The caption reads,

My parents were captured when I was sixteen. They both died in prison.

What do you remember about the day they were taken?

I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do this. Can we stop? (Keneally, 2014)

Examples such as this raise additional questions about the role of the researcher or journalist, reaching into wounds that stretch back half a century, resurfacing old traumas in the midst of the creation of new ones. And critically, it highlights the medium itself, as that photo was presented to millions of individuals around the world through the digital distribution of HONY’s blog, shared to other social media pages and even republished in mainstream newspapers. To what extent did that man understand the full implications when he agreed to be photographed and interviewed?

Negotiating the politically neutral in a politically charged field

A second critique of Stanton’s work with HONY centers on his self-professed neutrality: the lack of any larger socio-economic processes which fuel the particular events or situations depicted. Another image from the 2014 Iraq trip shows a young girl sitting upright and smiling, while her father seated next to her says, “She always dreams about the bombs” (Keneally, 2014). This caption seems to present the Iraq war as an impartial and unavoidable humanitarian tragedy, with bombs falling like hail from the sky. Nor are “the bombs” independent of those who drop them. Seeing this picture of the girl and her father, Western audiences might feel compassion or sympathy that a bright child is having nightmares of bombs, without being forced to confront the fact that the United States is the reason she dreams of bombs, the reason for the “humanitarian tragedy” and the “turmoil” of war.

The HONY project then stands in the uncomfortable position of working to humanize the people that Western powers have specifically dehumanized and exploited, but without connecting to any larger political consciousness. General statements like “the war” or “the bombs” are curiously disentangled from the web in which they operate. In the words of one article particularly critical of the United Nations (UN)/HONY World Tour, “HONY … does not implicate Westerners for the poverty, suffering, and conflict in these countries. Instead, the photographs present a decontextualized narrative of poverty and conflict that are disconnected from the global imbalances that created them” (Advani & Woldemikael, 2014). Stanton has repeatedly affirmed that he does not want to be political, that he’s simply telling the stories that are not often told, thereby positioning himself as the conduit through which stories are communicated to a broader audience. Perhaps it is not the place or position of Stanton or the blog to offer political commentary on each situation, on the myriad ways that Western/US imperialism has affected the lives of those he documents. Yet the omission of political content often makes the photos seem strangely disconnected from the larger structures that cause or sustain them.

One could also read the blog as a more implicit critique of structural factors. In a US domestic context, Stanton posted a series of photos that went viral, documenting a young boy in New York named Vidal, who spoke about his inspirational principal and his school. The campaign raised a tremendous amount of money (USD1.4 million) and public awareness for this school and for the hard work of the teachers, principal, and the students. Yet does this translate into greater involvement and appreciation for schools in other parts of the city and the country which are also doing important work and are also dangerously underfunded? Critics argue that these moments do not translate into daily life; that we collectively “feel good” about raising money and consider our work complete. Furthermore, the photo series itself was largely divorced from discussions about structural issues such as racism, poverty, and oppression that affect the lives of the teachers and students. One wonders as well about the lives of Vidal, Ms Lopez, and the other teachers and students at the academy after this whirlwind series of changes, as audiences read moving accounts of their difficulties and triumphs, poured money into the school, then slowly let them fade from view.

Conclusion

There are no simple conclusions about HONY. It may be the narrow perspective of a privileged, Western, White man who projects a humble story of seeking shared humanity, yet subscribes to deceptive universal principles that reduce his subjects to caricatures, who deals in shallow compassion and sentimentality to persuade his audiences to click “like” without having to do anything more, and who profits off the personal stories and histories of people’s lives. Yet it is not so simple. There are the often powerful stories themselves, and the millions of comments, the repeated affirmations that seeing these pictures and reading these stories changes people’s hearts and minds, even in small ways: “I promise to remember this man’s story and the millions I’ll never hear, to keep perspective and be thankful every day” (Williams, 2014). There is the outpouring of support and the immense financial donations. There is Stanton’s ongoing work documenting the stories of Syrian refugees at a time when Western powers are agonizing over whether to allow refugees into their countries. Against the fear-mongering, racist paranoia, and Islamophobia of far-right political leaders and media in the United States, and increasing violent attacks against Muslims, Stanton’s photos of Muslim refugees present people talking about the devastation of war, caring for their families, their hopes for their children, and their hopes for new beginnings. HONY still has room to grow and would benefit from ongoing conversations and engagement with established ethical practices and principles. Yet to create a massively popular site that seeks to dismantle the otherwise pervasive narrative of irreconcilable differences between people is perhaps not such a small thing after all.