I’m a huge fan of Humans of New York, Brandon Stanton’s photography project featuring portraits of random New Yorkers. If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the premise: Stanton walks around New York streets and asks strangers if he can take their picture. While he’s at it, he asks them personal questions—and gets some really poignant responses. Once recent shot features a woman who has a sad smile on her face. The caption goes like this: "I constantly worry if I'm doing OK with my boys. I spent the entire weekend with headphones on, working on a paper for graduate school, instead of spending time with them. I'm doing all this so one day day I'll earn enough to send them to college. But at the same time, they need help with their reading now."
Interspersed with the deeper, heavier posts are fun posts, too—like the occasional photos of children, which often go uncaptioned or are simply labeled, “today in microfashion.”
And that’s what this book centers on—those cute pictures of kids. Stanton’s first photography book was a New York Times-bestseller. It was basically his greatest hits. For this book, he’s taken the kid shots and compiled them into a children’s book called Little Humans.
If I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t blown away by the book. Stanton picked up photography after quitting his job as a bond trader just four years ago and openly admits his photography isn’t really all that amazing. It’s the stories—and Stanton’s skill in eliciting them—that makes the Humans of New York project so compelling.
And that’s what’s missing from this book. The portraits of the kids are adorable, but the accompanying text is—sorry—kind of unimaginative.
Hear for yourself—here’s my six-year-old daughter, Anna, reading the first part of the book: "Little humans can do BIG things, if they stand up tall and hold on tight. Sure, sometimes they fall. But they get back up."
See, not that profound. That said, I still like it. And I’m happy to have a copy in our already-stuffed bookshelves. For one, like I said, the kids featured in the book are adorable.
But more importantly? They’re diverse. Diverse like New York City, and increasingly, the rest of the country is. There are girls, boys, kids of different ages, different races. One kid is wearing a suit, another a Batman costume.
My own children are of mixed-race—I’m Chinese-Filipino and my husband is Caucasian. And honestly, I’ve noticed there aren’t enough children’s books that are multi-cultural. I especially like that the book isn’t about diversity, per se--it just accepts that Americans are different.
I asked my daughter Anna what she thinks of the book. She said, “It’s good, but—well, like, it’s not that interesting. But I really like the pictures because they look realistic, they’re really detailed and they show lots of people and what they can do. The words aren’t interesting, but the pictures are.”
So it’s like the opposite of how I usually feel about Humans of New York—okay pictures, but great stories. But you know what? It works just fine.
Reviewer Kate Lao Shaffner is the Keystone Crossroads reporter at WPSU. Her daughter, Anna, is an avid reader like her mother. "Little Humans" by Brandon Stanton is published by Farra, Straus and Giroux.
