ln 2025, Brandon Stanton, creator of “Humans of New York” and author of four #1 NYT bestselling books, will publish his most personal work yet: Dear New York, a photographic love letter to the city he has embraced. Opening with a deeply moving prologue that reads like a train ride through the city, the book expands into nearly five hundred full-color pages of portraits and stories from the streets of New York. And for the first time ever, unlike Stanton’s past books which were curated from his massive body of online work, more than 75-percent of the stories in Dear New York have never been published before.

Stanton created the groundbreaking first volume of Humans of New York in 2013, only three years after beginning his photography career. Called “one of the most important art projects of the decade” by The Washington Post, its unique combination of intimate portraiture and on-the-spot interviews spawned a style of storytelling that has become a hallmark of our digital age. Twelve years later, having now interviewed more than ten thousand people around the world, a seasoned artist returns home with a very personal mission: to use everything he’s learned, to capture the city he loves most.

A Guyanese grandmother boxing beneath the Roosevelt Island Bridge. A political refugee practicing Tai chi during a blizzard. A fentanyl dealer bringing his child to a playground on the Lower East Side. Dear New York is a book filled with contradictions, yet brimming with life. It is an unprecedented portrait of the world’s greatest city, and a deeply personal tribute to the people who provide its soul.