Jonathan Edelman is one of two Clark University students who is focusing his camera lens on faces around campus for a new project, Humans of Clark (HoC). Along with friend Nainika Grover of Brookline, Mass., the two sophomores are sharing snapshots of students and other members of the Clark community, along with quotes from spontaneous conversations, on a Facebook page that aims to “portray the characters and personalities of Clark University.”
Humans of Clark was inspired by Brandon Stanton’s popular photo series, Humans of New York (HoNY), which shares stories of strangers living in New York City with nearly 1 million followers on Facebook and Tumblr. The images are accompanied by brief captions or a few poignant words or sentences about the subject.
HoC founders Grover and Edelman discovered a mutual affinity for HoNY and decided to apply the formula on the Clark campus, believing their project had the potential to bring the campus closer together as a community.
“We wanted to adapt this here because we wanted the community to be able to know the various faces and stories of Clark,” wrote Grover. “A lot of the time we only recognize students by face, but we never know their stories.”
In an article sophomore Tessa Isis-Bahoosh wrote for The Scarlet (the student newspaper), she attributed HoC’s success to a combination of “the willingness of the community, the nature of social media, and the genuine interest with which the photographers approach their potential subjects.”
Edelman, a graduate of Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy, a member of Congregation Beth Shalom and the son of Alan and Debbie Sosland-Edelman, agreed, saying he found Clarkies to be approachable and comfortable sharing their stories.
“I’ve come up to people who I’ve never met before or sometimes even never seen before on campus and not only do I ask to photograph them, which I think is a really personal thing, then I ask them all these personal questions. I’m really enjoying the fact that they are so comfortable opening up to me just because I’m another Clark student. That means a lot to me,” Edelman said.
Edelman said the questions he and Grover ask are very personal.
“I usually start by asking them if they have a favorite memory from childhood. We always ask something that’s outside the Clark environment, something that we normally wouldn’t know about a person,” said Edelman, who is majoring in communications with a concentration in Holocaust and genocide studies.
“If a person is shy and doesn’t just start talking, I may ask what is the happiest moment of your life or what was the scariest moment or your life or what’s one piece of advice you’d give to your middle school self. These are just questions to get people going,” he continued. “Then people start opening up and get really comfortable answering questions.”
Since Sept. 8, Edelman and Grover have published more than 80 photographs of various members of the Clark community along with a personal reflection about his/her profession, personal goal, proudest moment or friend. Clark Political Science professor Ora Szekely’s photo is accompanied by a comment about the compassion she experienced while in Jordan during the 9/11 attacks; a more recent, lighthearted entry features a student who writes about wearing her St. Louis Cardinals’ jersey in Red Sox Nation. Stories that accompany HoC photographs range from whimsical to sentimental and profound (a student who survived cancer expressed the feeling of being “born again” after being released from the hospital).
As an example, one student answered the question “What would you tell your middle school self?” by saying, “Make sure you like yourself … cause if you don’t like yourself, you don’t have anything.”
One thing you won’t find on the HoC Facebook page, or on the website when it gets up and running, is a photo and profile of Edelman.
“When people ask to take pictures of me I always say I prefer to stay behind the camera. I really don’t like being photographed,” he said. “But I think I am comfortable enough with the Clark community that I would be willing to talk about something like that if someone else was doing the project and stopped and asked me.”
In a little more than three months, the HoC page has garnered more than 1,550 likes, and it is believed that the page has been viewed in more than 20 countries and shared by people around the world in 18 languages. Edelman hopes the project will continue for quite a long time.
“We’re never going to run out of students, we get 500 or 600 new students each year. My hope is that I’ll continue working on it through the rest of my years at Clark.”
“Nainika and I talked about how we hope to pass it down to someone else when we graduate,” he added. “We recently got a grant to set up a website for those who don’t have Facebook and we have the domain name for three years. The only reason we only have the name for three years is because it’s up to whoever runs Humans of Clark next to decide what to do with it.”
Jewish Chronicle editor Barbara Bayer and Clark student Dan Deutsch contributed to this story, which was originally published on the Clark University news blog.
