The bond trader who quit his job, bought a camera and changed New York street photography forever

Most photography careers begin with a camera. Brandon Stanton's began with a pink slip.

In 2010, the 26-year-old was working as a bond trader in Chicago. He'd recently bought his first camera, a Canon EOS 7D, and started taking photographs in downtown at the weekends. Then he lost the job. But rather than see it as a setback, he treated it as a starting gun.

He moved to New York, set himself the slightly deranged goal of photographing 10,000 New Yorkers and plotting their portraits on a map of the five boroughs, and started surviving on unemployment cheques that, as he later recalled, "almost paid rent". He'd go on to build one of the most followed photography projects in the history of the internet.

This month, PRWeek named him its 2026 Communicator of the Year; an award that places him alongside previous honorees including Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai. It's a curious category for a man with a camera and a gift for conversation, but it tells you something important about what Stanton actually does... which has never been quite as simple as taking photographs.

The green lady moment

Initially, Humans of New York was a Facebook account that delivered exactly what it promised: portraits of New Yorkers, accompanied by Stanton's own captions. Decent work, modest following, uncertain future. Then came what Stanton calls his eureka moment.

He'd photographed a woman dressed entirely in green, but the picture hadn't come out well. Unable to go out one day, he posted it anyway and added something she'd told him. That she used to wear a different color every day, but one day she wore green, it was a great day, and she'd worn green every day for the past 15 years.

The post outperformed everything else he had published by a considerable margin. And the lesson landed immediately. Turns out, people weren't following Humans of New York to look at photographs of strangers. They were following it to learn about them. The camera was a door. The conversation was the room.

From that point, Stanton evolved rapidly from street photographer to something closer to a roving oral historian; stopping people mid-stride, sitting with them on benches, drawing out their stories.

His interviews, conducted without a fixed set of questions, routinely ran to 90 minutes. The excerpts he published were often just a few hundred words. The gap between those two numbers is where his particular skill lives.

How to get 30 million followers

The scale of what followed is genuinely difficult to contextualise. Humans of New York now has around 30 million followers across social media; that's more than the New York Times. Stanton has photographed and interviewed over 10,000 people in 40 countries, travelling to Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Nepal, Uganda and beyond, armed with the same basic methodology: find a subject, earn their trust, let them speak.

Last October, he staged what is being described as the largest public artwork in New York in two decades. Dear New York took over Grand Central Station, stripped out all commercial advertising, and replaced it with 50-foot projections and full-scale portrait installations featuring the stories of ordinary New Yorkers. More than a thousand artists were involved. A book followed.

It was the logical endpoint of something Stanton has always believed: that the story of a stranger on a street corner, told with sufficient care and patience, can hold a room of millions. This latest award from PRWeek acknowledges him as a communicator, but photographers know what he really is. Someone who figured out, through necessity and stubbornness, that the camera is only the beginning.

Brandon Stanton will accept the PRWeek Communicator of the Year award at Cipriani Wall Street, New York, on 12 March.