The portrait on Instagram shows a young woman with long, dark hair and glasses looking away from the camera.
"I thought we had a close family until my grandmother died without leaving a will,” reads the caption below her photograph.
It’s just one of thousands of images shot by Humans of New York photographer Brandon Stanton. We don’t know much about this young woman, but this snippet of a story tells us a lot about her and her family.
Stanton began the HONY project in 2010 with the goal of photographing 10,000 New Yorkers. As he wandered the streets of NYC taking photos, he began asking his portrait subjects about their lives and recording their answers. He then posted the portraits along with a quotation from the interview online.
Some of the stories are happy, quirky and inspiring, as couples recount how they met and a single mother proudly proclaims her child goes to Yale. Others are infuriating or upsetting, as the subjects admit to deceiving the ones they love or spending money they should give to their kids on drugs.
Millions of people now view Stanton's photos and read his stories on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and the HONY website. There’s a HONY book, too.