You know Humans of New York, of course. That popular Facebook page where denizens of Manhattan are captured, portrait-like, in their daily sojourns around Manhattan–and their photos eventually enhanced by a caption that told a little story about them–their fears, their hopes, their triumphs, their tribulations, sometimes their secrets, often their rages. It has spawned millions of fans as well as a veritable industry. And the long and short of it is: one either loves HONY, as its fans call it–or detests it with passion.
The crux in these disparate reactions lies in one element that HONY seems to do best: calculated sentimentality. In that sense, HONY is either heartwarming or saccharine. Take your pick.
In Notes of a Native Son, the great James Baldwin once wrote: “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”
This passage has always puzzled me somewhat for the veracity of its pronouncement. And also for the fact that I have always considered Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to be a novel of well-calibrated sentimentality, a book that I discovered in the years of my own unfathomed yearnings as a teenager, and whose story of a doomed love affair that leads to the death of the titular character had me bawling my eyes out.
I think of this quote because it serves as the opening epigraph to an article by one Melissa Smythe titled On Sentimentality: A Critique of Humans of New York, published in the online literary journal Warscapes.
In Smythe’s scathing assessment of Brandon Stanton’s tremendously popular photography project–which is spread out in various platforms including Facebook, Tumblr, and now in print–she notes: “The problem with sentimentality here is not the infusion of emotion into a political issue; on the contrary, it is the funneling of emotion into mute forms, preventing the marriage of thought and feeling that produces the most concentrated social action. Sentiment, in cases of social strife, obfuscates constructive empathy, perhaps the element whose disuse most directly sustains … blissful and deadly ignorance.”
Truth to tell, I am in agreement with most of her thesis–but I doubt her attack on HONY as an example. Let me explain.
A few months ago, a work of accidental photojournalism by a medical student named Joyce Torrefranca appeared on Facebook depicting the affecting image of a poor Filipino boy studying in a street corner under the poor light of a streetlamp. The photo went viral, with thousands of people commiserating over the abject poverty that drove this boy to such desperate measures. Soon, almost predictably, the image became a meme bearing messages of hope: that success was ultimately up to the individual, that striving hard was the only sure way out of poverty, and so on and so forth. I felt bothered by the avalanche of such memes, and I found myself demurring from helping its spread.
The sentiment didn’t seem to ring true–even though the situation depicted is, in fact, for real.
And then I came across this article by Carl Cederstrí¶m in U.K.’s The Guardian that gave specific warning with this headline: “Beware inspirational online images–they may be more insidious than you think,” tackling specifically the photograph in question.
Cederstrí¶m writes: “This is far from the first inspirational story to attract attention online. Whether it’s a limbless man surfing, a cancer survivor climbing some of the world’s highest peaks or a homeless woman making it all the way to Harvard, we are easily touched by these stories, and there’s nothing strange or wrong with that. But we might want to examine some of the reasons why we–or others–love them so much, or at least question the conclusions some of us wish to draw from them… In these interpretations, the picture is used to suggest that there are no excuses for failure or poverty. Even if you are poor and live in a makeshift home, you have the choice to work yourself out of that predicament. All you need is determination, willpower and the right, can-do attitude. Private troubles, whether poverty or unemployment, should remain private troubles. They should not be regarded as public issues because that is merely a way of trying to find an excuse. Such is the lesson we should teach ourselves and take from this.”
He continues: “But more problematic than their questionable usefulness is that these methods implicitly encourage socially vulnerable groups, whether poor or unemployed, to stop looking for answers in the public sphere. They are told instead that the barrier lies within themselves.” What Cederstrí¶m is saying is that the sentimentality that seems to have sprung from the photo absolves the system that made the boy poor in the first place, and puts the blame instead on the individual for not trying hard enough to be successful. That’s dangerous.
Cederstrí¶m concludes: “Again, there is nothing wrong with being moved by a picture of a young boy concentrating hard on his homework. But we should remember that pictures of this kind may serve more sinister purposes when paired with ‘inspirational’ messages. Serious discussion of external circumstances–including a proper understanding of inequality–is not helped by the suggestion that the only thing holding a person back is their attitude.”
Semiotics of course teaches us to always question the images that we are bombarded with, for they often come with unseen secondary meanings that can be manipulated to fool us. (This is how advertising works, and why companies pay millions for them.) Photographs or images are dangerous in this respect.
Smythe comes to battle HONY with the same reservations I did for that sentimental meme of that boy under the lamplight. And yet I found her arguments jarring. A friend of mine who agreed with her assessment explained to me the source of the discomfort with HONY: “[HONY’s] concern is focused on how sentimentality turns the depth of feeling of the stories in the caption into the flatness of a photo, that most of the time does not even reflect its caption. The curation of HONY is less about stories of people (documentary) and more of artifacts in a museum of inert ‘humans,’ with a plaque attached to them (taxonomy/ethnography). It’s especially risky in social media … because sentimentality, without interrogation, is enough, can be enough to move people.” That last part is perfectly true.
But ultimately I think the rest also perfectly misunderstands the project that HONY has taken on. For one thing, it is not photojournalism. For another, I have always thought that what HONY does is more of an art project that tries to embody for the social media generation the idea that the people we meet on the streets–packaged the way they are to reflect the surface of the lives they lead–contain wellsprings of hidden stories we cannot know in real life because we are so busy walking past them.
That “flatness” of the HONY photographs? That’s the same flatness with which we “see” each other when we actually do notice each other on the streets. HONY is the extension and corrective to that. I cannot expect HONY to pair its captions with photos that are, ummm, “truer.” But does anyone really want to pair a caption about dark desperation with an actual photograph of the subject about to jump off a building? That’s being too literal, and belies a lack of the imagination. Give me a HONY photo of a smiling woman in a gown on the way to an upscale party downtown, and make me read the caption about her rage that she feels for her father and for herself: allow me to make the jump and the connection, to appreciate the irony of surfaces.
For me, the captions in HONY are perfect counterpoints to the photographs, and in a sense it’s a perfect combination of two mediums. The captions take that extra step we never really do in life: to actually pause for a while, then to regard the human being behind the “flatness” he or she projects, and to hear what stories he or she can tell, something they can do when asked with sincerity and forthrightness. The brief stories that go along with the photos have always struck me as good windows to people’s lives and their struggles. I appreciate that about HONY. I see them as real stories that show depth, if only too briefly; I guess some people prefer to see them as museum plaques.
Truth to tell, I have never seen the people in HONY as “inert.” There is a vitality to them that I like, even if that vitality sometimes gets paired with horror stories. The author of this critique DOES see them as inert, but it is clearly a case of “what you see is what you get.” You cannot please everyone.
Smythe eventually strikes me as being too cynical, it borders on the dangerous. I’m not saying HONY should be free of criticism, because it can be critiqued, and critiqued vigorously. For some reason I really take issue with this one critique, although I believe her thesis but not her example. Her essay somehow reminds me of people you don’t want to invite over for dinner: you take them to a Thanksgiving celebration with family and close friends, and all evening all they can do is complain about the turkey not being free-range or something.
In the final analysis though, I like sentimentality. Like many things, there’s sentimentality that’s handled well (Jerry Maguire!), and I love when I get this. And there’s also sentimentality that’s crass and awfully done. (Patch Adams!) You call this one mawkishness. You have to make distinctions. HONY, I think, does it well.
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Author’s email: ian.casocot@gmail.com
