Blake I. Collier writes in Christ & Pop Culture on a group attempting to transcend the tendency to “demonize and dehumanize” the other. From the article Humans of New York: Reclaiming the Image of God:
Bucking this trend is Humans of New York (HONY), a web project that immerses its followers in idiosyncrasy, celebrating the uniqueness of each person and highlighting humanity’s breadth and depth. Brandon Stanton, the site’s creator, set out to capture 10,000 New York City residents through word and image, and the results run counter to the dehumanizing trends in our contemporary world. Rather than painting the denizens of NYC with a broad brush deleterious to detail, Stanton revels in the singularity of each of his subjects. A brief perusal of the site shows a range of ethnicities, races, genders, ages, socio-economic status, religious beliefs, and human contexts. Stanton’s site captures in microcosm an essential thread in a diverse tapestry.
Captions to these images range from quirky to anxious, religious to depraved. Reductionist, they are not. They shatter our preconceived conceptions about the other, underscoring C. S. Lewis’s statement—in A Grief Observed—that “[a]ll reality is iconoclastic.”