“That’s the strangest thing about living here. If I met someone and we got on, I’d consider them a friend within a week, but not here. Here, it’d be like a year afterwards and they’d still not consider you close”


I met up with an old friend this afternoon and we went for a good ol’ catch-up and coffee. I had no special place in mind, but we ended up at a coffee shop in the Corn Exchange.

As I ordered our Americano’s from the vendor I noticed Chris' accent and asked where he was from,

“Oh, Chicago”
“Great! What brought you here then?”
“My wife, she’s British”

We chatted a little further about emigration, he had not had a good experience of it unfortunately, before we took out seats. My friend received an important phone call at one point, and I took the opportunity to ask Chris for a portrait.

Chris had heard of the concept before (Humans of New York), and I explained how I took inspiration from it last year and that’s where this project originated. I also went into detail about the differences between HONY and HOL - the difficulty in getting the deep, meaningful stories which the photographer of HONY manages to extract in contrast to the conversational topics which I normally have.

That’s when Chris talked about the ‘strangest thing about living here’, and in some ways what he said was a generalisation of course, but it rung true with many of my encounters. Rarely did a person open up to the degree that they do on HONY. I’m not saying that is a good or a bad thing, it’s simply an observation and something which I got to know very early on in this project. It’s also an aspect of the project which I have questioned more than anything else, as what makes HONY great is the accompanying copy.

Anyway, the nature of this project and it’s evolving state is still in it’s infancy in my opinion, and we shall see where it takes me...


Humans of Leeds