From Brandon Stanton's Humans of New York 'About' page:
"My name is Brandon
and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. HONY resulted
from an idea that I had to construct a photographic census of New York
City. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive
catalogue of the city’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000
New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months
with this goal in mind. But somewhere along the way, HONY began to
take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and
short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets
alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions
became the subject of a vibrant blog, which over the past two years has
gained hundreds of thousands of followers. With over 180,000 followers
on Facebook and 80,000 followers on Tumblr, HONY now provides a worldwide audience with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers on the streets of New York City."