Brandon Stanton Quotes

I love to photograph people in their own environment. It offers clues to what's important in their lives.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

Just as Renaissance artists provided narratives for the era they lived in, so do I. I'm always looking beyond the surface. I've done that ever since I first picked up a camera.

Obviously I am a photographer and I believe in my medium: I do think that powerful photographs can force change. It doesn't take long to look and be engaged in a strong image whereas, with a story, you have to actually sit down and pause and be involved in it.

My job as a portrait photographer is to seduce, amuse and entertain.

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

I often go out on the street with my camera and ask questions.

Photography must be integrated with the story.

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen.

I don't have lights, I don't have assistants, I just go and meet somebody and take a photograph. That's really basic, and that's how I used to work when I was 17 or 18 in Holland.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures.

One of my favorite photographers is Ruvan Wijesooriya, who takes most of the LCD photos. His work is incredibly colloquial and raw.

I'm trying to grow more as a journalist and understand the story I'm photographing in order to communicate it in a better way.

To ask people's permission to take their pictures? Sometimes it feels right to ask, but I will not ask, unless it is essential to do so. If you asked all the time, you would miss everything. With the exception of portraits, it is generally bad news if people are looking at the camera.

Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

With years of experience doing whatever it takes to get to the bottom of each story, I am looking forward to covering the stories in the human dimension and impart the passion and visceral reactions the audience seeks.

To see, and to show, is the mission now undertaken by Life.

A lot of my friends were mostly working in black-and-white - people like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and others. We would exchange prints with each other, and they were always very supportive of what I was doing.

The most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.

You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.

Since 1970, I've been using text and ephemera as well as photographs in order to tell stories of one kind or another. There's a thread that runs through all the work that is to do with bearing witness. The photographs are about asking questions, though, not answering them.

I work on stories rather than individual pictures.