[PHOTO] "Humans of New York and the Cavalier Consumption of Others"

[rfmcdonald]

Vinson Cunningham's article in The New Yorker criticizing Humans of New York for its shallowness and stage-managedness is something I do not entirely agree with. Sometimes stories don't need framing, but sometimes they do.

“Stories” betrays shallow notions of truth (achievable by dialogic cut-and-paste) and egalitarianism. Both come too easily. Instead of the difference acknowledged by Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You and Their, Stanton’s all-encompassing title implies a vague, flattening humanism, too quick to forget the barriers erected—even here, and now, in New York—against real equality. (Stanton has lately taken his project farther afield as well, to India, Pakistan, Iran.) The money for Mott Hall Bridges Academy makes us feel good—and why not?—but there are many other schools, and they are part of the same unequal system.

The quick and cavalier consumption of others has something to do with Facebook, Humans of New York’s native and most comfortable medium. The humans in Stanton’s photos—just like the most photogenic and happy-seeming and apparently knowable humans in your timeline—are well and softly lit, almost laminated; the city recedes behind them in a still-recognizable blur. We understand each entry as something snatched from right here, from someplace culturally adjacent, if not identical, to the watcher’s world; there’s a sense (and, given Stanton’s apparent tirelessness, a corresponding reality) that this could just as easily be you, today, beaming out from the open windowpane of someone else’s news feed. Any ambiguity or intrigue to be found in a HONY photo is chased out into the open, and, ultimately, annihilated by Stanton’s captions, and by the satisfaction that he seems to want his followers to feel.

One of the great joys, after all, of looking at a portrait is the imperfectible act of reading a face. Is that a smile or a leer? Anguish or insight? Focus or fear? “Stories” offers answers before the questions have a chance to settle. The pursed, passing smile of a young woman in what looks like Union Square is made, by force, to correspond to the recent death of her sister. The downward glance of a snow-besieged redhead can only be understood as having to do with the fiancé she lost to the war in Iraq. The dirt-tanned wrist of a beggar, very obviously slit and scabbing over, can’t be trusted to do its own work. “Everything I knew has been washed out into the water,” the man says, speaking of his chronic brain damage. “I’ve tried to commit suicide several times.”