Photographer Brandon Stanton has generated quite a bit of attention in the photo world through his project Humans of New York, which features thousands of portraits that form a visual census of the city. His goal is to capture 10,000 portraits of New Yorkers that are associated with points on a map.

Stanton recently visited the country of Iran to shoot similar portraits of its inhabitants. He tells us that by visiting the country as a tourist rather than a press member, he was able to get a “remarkable amount of access” in order to create a beautiful collection of intimate street portraits.
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Philippe Echaroux is a young French photographer who makes a living shooting portraits of celebrities (among other things). Recently, he carried out a personal project that had been brewing in his mind for some time: using his celebrity portraiture experience and style for spontaneous portraits of ordinary strangers encountered on the street. The short video above shows how Echaroux roamed around with his small team and set up makeshift photo studios for each of the portraits.
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Based in New York, 46-year-old Chris Arnade is a banker by trade and a passionate photographer in his free time. While those attributes may seem pretty commonplace, it’s Arnade’s subjects that make his work stand out: Arnade focuses his “hobby” on sharing the faces and stories of drug addicts in the Bronx. He writes,

I post people’s stories as they tell them to me. I am not a journalist, I don’t verify, just listen.

It’s very easy to simply run with your crowd, to not explore the amazing diversity and perspectives that are offered. It’s also very easy to ignore others. By not looking, by not talking to them, we can often fall into constructing our own narrative that affirms our limited world view. What I am hoping to do, by allowing my subjects to share their dreams and burdens with the viewer and by photographing them with respect, is to show that everyone, regardless of their station in life, is as valid as anyone else. [#]

You can check out Arnade’s photograph in this Flickr set or read an interview he did with The Gothamist.

Faces of Addiction (via Chase Jarvis)

What does it take to shoot portraits of random strangers on a sidewalk? Photographer Clay Enos, known for his portraits for the movie Watchmen, walks us through his process for capturing impromptu portraits of passers-by on a white backdrop.

One takeaway is that it pays to be outgoing and social, since your conversation skills can do a lot towards making subjects feel at ease.

(via f stoppers)