HONY’s Brandon Stanton Explains How to Approach Strangers During Must-See Q&A

Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind the now iconic Humans of New York photo blog and #1 NYT bestselling book Humans of New York recently sat down with some students and faculty at the University College of Dublin to receive the James Joyce Award.

But more important for us than the award is that he also sat down to talk about HONY how it has become what it currently is.

The above video comes in at 15 minutes and is probably the most powerful and shared of the bunch. In it, Stanton demonstrates — with some help from a tearful and ecstatic volunteer — how he actually goes about approaching people on the streets in NYC. This is probably the question he gets most often and the demonstration is damn near priceless if you’re just getting into street photography.

However, this wasn’t the only thing Stanton spoke about while at UCD. There was a captivating talk about HONY and how it came about (above) as well as a full Q&A session that led to many more insightful responses. Below, I’ve collected a few of my favorites for you to check out.

If you’d like to see the full list, you can head on over to the playlist UCD has set up on YouTube.