How HONY’s Brandon Stanton is making the world warm up to ‘Humans of Pakistan’ on Facebook

It all started in the summer of 2010 when a New York based photographer entered our Facebook timelines and instilled some sense amongst the array of pouting selfies, cat videos and status updates on finding love, jobs and dealing with breakups and haircuts.

From being just another New York based photographer with a dream, Brandon Stanton became the one photographer, people across the globe started following.

According to his blog, Stanton’s ambitious idea was to document the lives of 10,000 New York inhabitants in order to create an exhaustive and informative catalogue of the people who make up the city. However, somewhere along the way, the project molded itself into an entirely different silhouette than the one carved out for it.

Collecting short snippets from the people he would meet, Stanton started compiling them with their photographs and putting them up on his blog, marking the birth of Humans of New York.

The photo-blog which now boasts of a Facebook page and Instagram handle comes alive daily with vibrant portraits and stories of strangers offering a glimpse into their lives, cultures and cities and is voraciously lapped up by its dedicated following of readers.

Such is its popularity that in my three years of being in awe of the blog, I cannot remember any instance of a HONY post not going viral or being shared excessively on Facebook.

This level of idolization can only be attributed to its maker Stanton’s disturbingly beautiful way with words and a knack for finding extraordinary in the ordinary.

Not one to limit his storytelling to just New York, Stanton brought alive the ‘humans’ of Iran, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Kenya, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Nepal, Vietnam, Mexico and last but not the least, India, by gathering stories during his travels to these places.

And, then he did the unthinkable.

With one announcement, he made the world sit up and take notice of a complex country mirred with controversies, the people of which are recurrent prey to bad press.

“Continuing in the tradition of last summer, I’m going to be travelling during the month of August and posting stories from overseas. Only this time I’ll be visiting two countries instead of trying to span the world, because that was exhausting, and it also caused my poor senile dog to forget my existence. The first stop is Pakistan. Hope you enjoy.”

The dreaded country which could be best described as a pitstop for inhuman and horrific incidents, continued violence and regressive traditions, was to be the latest subject of Stanton’s lens and stories.

I wouldn’t call what happened next as surprising, but it wouldn’t be wrong to assume no soul anticipated this response.

He visited the Gilgit-Baltistan region of North Pakistan, which he termed as a place with ‘some of the most amazing landscapes in the planet’ and showed the other side of the country which most of us don’t bother to dwell on.

With his series of unforgettable portraits, some funny, some witty and some downright heartbreaking, Stanton reminded the people of the world that in our haste to hate Pakistan, it should not escape our minds that this country is just like any other country.

Granted, it is a place wherein the bad overshadows the good, but the fact that it still is a country where good exists, should not be omitted.
Stanton’s Humans of Pakistan is thus a celebration of those very people in Pakistan who are the good.

An eight year old girl wants to become a chef because she’d be able to make her own dessert. A brother admits that his favourite thing about his sister is her happiness. A grandfather shares how he bears the responsibility of bringing up his three grandchildren, who refuse to sleep without him beside them. A girl bares all about having to give up music due to parental pressure and the age-old clichéd pressure of ‘What will people think?’, while another man who since birth has been paralysed from waist down got so good at playing music that his initially hesistant parents didn’t have the heart to stop him any longer. A twenty something girl admits that even though she craves to be independent, that shouldn’t imply that she wants to be alone or do everything on her own.

These are not stories exclusive to Pakistan. These are stories that are universal. Stories which make us realize that the humans of Pakistan face the same joys, tribulations, experience the same barriers, insecurities and heartbreaks that someone from New York or for that matter, India do.

All it took Stanton to begin changing perception towards Pakistan were words effortlessly stringed together and pictures laden with expressions.

If the unprecedented enthusiastic reactions from humans across the world to these posts are anything to go by, Brandon Stanton has managed to do what innumerable diplomatic talks could not- absolve Pakistan’s reputation.

Image credit: Indiatimes and Humans of New York Facebook page