A young guy named Brandon Stanton lost his job in Chicago and moved to New York without much of a plan, all he knew was that he enjoyed taking photos of people on the streets. After capturing a persons image, he found that he wanted to stay and chat with them for a little while and to hear their diverse and interesting stories. He realized that he could create a beautiful image by complimenting a person’s portrait with their words. These portraits and captions became the subject of his now famous blog, which over the past few years has gained a huge following. With over one million followers on Facebook HONY enables humans from around the world to view snapshots of the lives of strangers in New York City.
A number of similar blogs have taken inspiration from HONY and have sprung up all over the internet. We can now view Humans of Paris, Humans of Tel Aviv, Humans of Sydney and more. My friend and I have both been avid followers of HONY for a while now, and so we decided to create Humans of Itaewon. We chose Itaewon as the area of Seoul in which we would take photos because of its diversity. You can walk the main street for a few minutes and meet people from all over the world. There are restaurants serving cuisine from Bulgaria to Nigeria and Itaewon is host to Seoul’s only mosque, the Seoul Central Mosque.
Aliens X Aliens.
Celebrating the diversity of Seoul, South Korea.
Inspired by HONY.
For our first few pictures we went out to meet people on a cold Sunday night and initially approaching strangers proved challenging. Overall though, everyone we spoke to was super friendly and opened up to us after a minute or so and no one that we approached declined to have their picture taken. We got lost in a few of Itaewons random little alleys behind the main road and our fingers froze, but we met some hilarious and kind people. It’s such an interesting way to delve into a snippet of someone’s life, if only for a moment.
Check out Humans of Itaewon on facebook!
