One of my very favorite things to do is say, “It’s like Grand Central Station in here” while standing in Grand Central itself. I’ve told that joke more times than I can count and texted it to friends and family and also posted it online. What could be funnier? I never get tired of telling it; as far as I am concerned, that joke never gets old. In the fall of 2025, though, when I was in Grand Central for the express purposed of visiting the fabled Dear New York exhibit, I didn’t make it once. Because during the two weeks that the massive photography show was hosted there, it didn’t resemble Grand Central as closely as usual. It more nearly resembled a cathedral to humanity, and all of the commuters and visitors became its joyful acolytes.
Perhaps you were able to see it yourself last October in the city; it was the largest scale public art exhibit in New York since The Gates wound their way through Central Park, exactly 20 years earlier. But Dear New York was set entirely indoors, underground along the tracks of the MTA subway trains and of the Metro North commuter lines, above ground in the vaunted spaces of Vanderbilt Hall and the Main Concourse. For the span of the two-week—long exhibit, there was no advertising to be found anywhere in those places, only the portraits of New Yorkers on the walls and turnstiles.
They were an amazing sight to behold, the sea of faces floating above another sea of faces, New Yorkers for as far as the eye could see. Each of these portraits was taken by photographer Brandon Stanton, who in 2010 set out to take what he called “a photographic census of the city.” In the intervening years, by all measures, he has succeeded, photographing more that 10,000 New Yorkers in all. Over the course of his amazing career, he has also helped raise tens of millions of dollars for the subjects he has photographed, putting names to their faces and telling their stories.
Continue reading
