Hello again readers. I’m a mixed-media type of girl but two of my biggest passions in life are people and photography, especially people in photography. A few months ago I stumbled upon a wildly popular blog on Tumblr featuring this exact thing: people, in photos, located around New York City.

The project is called Humans of New York (HONY for short). The premise is simple: a portrait is taken of a random person walking the streets of New York, with a short caption from or about them at the bottom.

The project was created by Brandon Stanton who, after making a $3000 bet in college that Obama would win the Presidency, became a bond trader in Chicago. After losing it all after his job went south, he moved to New York to follow his dreams of photography. His project originally started with a simple goal of gaining 10,000 portraits of individuals in New York. But when he began talking to the people he was photographing, it became a whole new story.

So why has such a simple blog become so wildly popular?

What Stanton says is that it’s all about peeking into the lives of strangers of New York City, and New Yorkers are a marvel to look upon. It’s the idea that you can learn a short snippet about someone you probably will never meet or never see in your life, and yet for those few seconds you’re looking at their photo and reading what they said, you feel as though you have a connection, and understanding with them, and it’s kind of magical. Some of Stanton’s biggest peaks on the site followed his photographing of individuals affected by Hurricane Sandy and taking a semi-controversial trip to photograph people in Iran.

HONY really brings together a whole new type of human connection. The project, and the stories, have become so inspiring that many spin offs have been created in different cities all across the globe. Wikipedia gives a few examples such as Humans of London, Humans of Copenhagen, Humans of Rome, Humans of India, Souls of San Francisco, etc. Just one guy with a camera has started a cultural revolution, and has brought together people from all walks of life to share one or two lines of their life stories, and make us remember that we are all a human of somewhere.

The blog has become so popular that Stanton recently released a Humans of New York book which immediately debuted as number one on the New York Times Best Sellers list for hardback books.

HONY updates daily on Tumblr and Facebook, and has almost two million followers on Facebook, respectively.

You can find Brandon at humansofnewyork.com, facebook.com/humansofnewyork, and twitter.com/humansofny