The Inspiration for Humans of Blair

Montgomery Blair High School is an eclectic mix of students who are diverse in race, ethnicity, religion, age, gender, culture,

socioeconomic status, and more. With almost 3000 students, pupils rarely get recognized individually. In my Cap Diamond

project, I wanted to highlight the difficulties and beauty in each Blair student’s life.

Humans of Blair was modeled after Humans of New York, or HONY, run and created by Brandon Stanton. This photo project

shows how all people, no matter their differences in race, age, or the like, go through similar struggles and journeys in their lives in New York. Stanton has also traveled to other countries, especially

ones poverty-stricken, often experiencing war or famine, to provide a look at the suffering that the individuals in these places

endure.

Blair often feels a bit like a small city, filled with people from every corner of Montgomery County, and simultaneously the

world. While Stanton asks a variety of questions to each person, I asked every interviewee their greatest struggle and greatest passion, either generally in life, or in high school. Some only

answered one question, and others gave short, quick answers, but many went deeply into what drives their passions and

struggles. Throughout each page for every individual, although only representing a very small sample of the school, one can see

the trends of the pain of loss, fear, stress, and instability, alongside the love of art, music, sports, writing, traveling, and much more that exists inside the diverse student body of Blair. This project was in no way designed to compare or weigh the

struggles of different students against each other, but simply to paint a picture of the tumultuous journeys of different high school

students.

Leah Savage took the pictures, typed the interviews, and put the book together. Special thank you to the talented Judy Tram for

the cover art, to Griffin Reilly and Silver Chips for the camera and other resources, and to every person who was involved and

shared their experiences!

Claire

"I feel like everyone goes through a lot of changes during high

school, and has a lot of trying to figure out who they are as people, and

just like finding themselves. I think that for me especially, I am such a vastly different

person than I was at the beginning of 9th grade,

just because a lot of stuff has happened in my life that has forced me to reevaluate who I am and what I care about and what I value. For example, during freshman year, my mom died, and she had cancer,

and having that happen definitely has changed me in a ton of different ways. Definitely I care about people a lot more, and I care a lot more

about telling people that I love that I love them, and I have just become a super affectionate person, just all the time telling people that I love them. And I mean I think that’s a good thing. I think that,

out of something bad that happened, that’s one good thing that I feel like has happened, and I see totally my entire family is the same way. We’re all very much more affectionate towards one another and every single morning my dad is like ‘drive carefully!’ 8 times before I leave, so that’s definitely a huge change that I’ve witnessed. I don’t know, I felt like before, or during 9th grade, I thought it was really cool to be

sarcastic and hate things and not be passionate about stuff, or just be edgy or rebellious. But I feel like now I’ve kind of found that for me, I’m

the happiest and it works the best when I’m more positive and focus on the good and better things that are happening, or the silver linings,

which also kind of leads me to the next thing. I feel like through the course of high school, because of going through losing my mom, I

really had a need to find something that I could spend time on and that would help me not focus on the shitty stuff happening in my life. So I was into art in the beginning of high school, but now it’s one of the

most important things in my life is, just making art and creating things. I feel like out of grief and stuff, I just wanted to make things, and

through making things I just felt like I found myself and found a voice. Being able to express things through art and show others has become something that’s really important to me. And high school is a mess, it’s

such a mess, but I feel like there are a lot of meaningful things that have happened. I’ve definitely changed so much, and not for better or

for worse; I can’t really change it, but I can always choose to focus on the good things."

Ree

"My greatest struggle in high school was moving into a new environment every year, going to a different high school, and getting

to know the people. It’s just, every year I had to get used to my environment and everything. I also struggled because I had to get two

jobs, and I had to work and go to school at the same time because I had rent to pay, and that wasn’t easy for me. I would be at work the whole night and then I would just be late to school, and I even lost

credit in two of my classes, and had to make it up by the end of the school year, so that was really hard."

Randi

"My biggest passion is writing, and I think that from coming to Blair, it’s really grown. I’ve discovered new types of writing; taking Mrs.

Plotinsky’s creative writing class has shown me a lot about how much creativity I have when it comes to writing things that aren’t exactly for

school, or essays. I’ve found a lot of comfort in writing poetry and coming up with my own stories and being able to create pieces of

writing that other people can actually react to and feel emotions from reading. Another part of writing that I got to explore was journalistic writing, with Silver Chips online and also journalism class; I learned a lot about news writing and writing features and opinion pieces and I

feel like writing has become a new platform for self expression for me. It’s something that I hope to never give up. One struggle that I’ve been facing in high school is that I have an older brother who has struggled

a lot with drug addiction, and he’s been struggling a lot while he’s finishing up college, you know being addicted to a lot of drugs. It’s taken a toll on me and my family because we have to deal with the

after effects of his actions, and it’s definitely made my family stronger, in a way, because we’ve had to come together in a lot of ways to deal

with these things. It’s been really hard because it’s not something I can talk about with everyone and bring up often, so that’s been one of my

biggest struggles I’ve had to face in high school."

Mark

“My greatest passion is sports, I play lacrosse and I like basketball. I started playing basketball when I just saw some people playing and I

just started joining them, like when I was little, and I kept playing. And for lacrosse, I just started playing this year; my friends kept telling me

to try out and I did and I had a good season. M greatest struggle is procrastinating. It’s so easy to do, procrastination is probably the

easiest thing you can do. I procrastinate on homework, tests, school basically. It impacts my grades sometimes, I always end up doing my work last minute. My parents get mad at me, but I don’t know, I just

don’t listen to them sometimes, I stopped doing that, too. I don’t get in trouble with them as much as I used to...nowadays, it’s on me.

Ben

“I would say my greatest passion, at this point in my life, is just making sure that I set myself up in the future to be content. I don’t want too many luxuries or anything but I do want to be content later on in life.

My greatest struggle right now would have to be anxiety, and managing my time, but I think with time, I’ll get better at that. I think that right now, being a young adolescent of color, I’m also learning how to act in society and how society perceives me, and I’m just, I

don’t know, learning how I fit in right now.”

Elbi

“My greatest struggle is school, because it’s everyday, and it’s long, so it’s hard to keep up with the work. After school’s over, they give you homework, and then when you go home, you don’t have a lot of time to do it, because school is so long, so sometimes homework brings

your grades down. My greatest passion is playing baseball. My friend told me, ‘play baseball with me!’ That’s how I started playing, and then

I joined a baseball team. I like playing baseball because it’s like, you can meet new people and then it’s also a sport that requires skill, so

you have to work as a team to win the game.”

Claudia

“So freshman year I tore my ACL, and that itself wasn’t the challenge. It was a pain in the butt, but it wasn’t a challenge. I think the challenge was, because I was a soccer player, I was like ‘oh yeah I’m going to be on the basketball team, I’m going to be on the soccer team’, and then I was like ‘what do I do with myself?’ Like I didn’t know what to do with my time. So I think I had to figure out, ‘what is my passion?’ Because I didn’t know anymore. That was the biggest challenge, personally I’ve always known what I wanted to be when I grew up, what I’m going to do in a month, like I’ve always had a timeline, and this was the first time I didn’t have a timeline. So that scared the shit out of me, like I

didn’t know what was going to happen. I’m a super power crazy person, one of the reasons I love being Yearbook editor in chief is

because I love being in charge, and so not having any control felt really intimidating and I did not like that. So that was my biggest challenge, not tearing my ACL but because of it I had to be like, ‘I can’t do sports anymore, what do I do?’ And then my biggest passion, as a result of that, I think I found a bunch of different passions and I decided not to settle on one, so Yearbook became a passion, and then I made a blog junior year I think, and I was like eh, I don’t really like it and so I redid it this year; that’s definitely one of my passions. And I think another

one of my passions, the umbrella thing for me, is realizing that I don’t have to have a passion! Like realizing that I can just continue to have more passions and find more things that I love to do and that I really

like and yeah, that’s my passion: finding passions."

Alia

"My greatest passion would probably have to be singing. I live in a pretty musical household, so I’m always around music and my mom’s

always singing and stuff like that. So it’s something that I kind of always do, without even realizing it, I guess. I used to have really bad stage fright, like I was too nervous to actually go and sing in front of people, but then I did a talent show with a friend and doing it with

someone else kind of helped me to be less shy and be more outgoing and perform in front of people, so now I feel a lot more comfortable doing that. I would say that my biggest struggle is focusing on my

schoolwork, because I feel like I have senioritis even though I’m not a senior. I’ll get home and I just want to go to sleep, so I don’t even open up my backpack or start my schoolwork and I know it’s something that I should focus on, but I’m just too lazy. So I think that that’s definitely

my biggest struggle."

Andy

“My greatest passion is soccer, I’ve always loved it, since I was little, I’ve always played it a lot. One of the hardest things to accomplish in

my life was to come to the U.S. because it was really hard because my dad didn’t want me to come. They didn’t let me, but I still came, it

didn’t matter. My parents came with me, but then they left. I’m with my brothers here. I live with my brother, it’s fine, he takes care of me and everything. I’m free now, I can do anything, what I want. I’m from Honduras. I like living here better, it’s awesome because I don’t live with my parents. Who wouldn’t want to not? I can go home, like, at 3 am and my brother won’t care...Well, he will care, he’ll be like ‘where you at?’ And I’ll be like ‘oh, at the movies,’ and he’ll be like ‘oh, cool

then,” just that. So I have a lot of freedom.”

Calvin

"I’m trying to become a doctor, so my greatest passion is helping people when they’re in need, maybe even joining the Peace Corps

around college. I got interested in helping people when I was around 6. My great grandfather passed away, which was my first experience with death, and then maybe around a decade later I discovered that I had a

little sister who also passed away. I felt helpless that as an older brother I couldn’t protect my baby sister, so I thought maybe I could

help other people from experiencing the same kind of thing. My greatest struggle has been that there’s been a lot of conflict within my family, like over the past decade, and even though I still believe family

is the most important thing that you can possibly have, it’s still like, these constant drifts and constant tears, they make me feel like family

might not be the only thing, but it’s still one of the more important things."

Lindsay

“My biggest passion is art, and being able to make things that are creative, and using my creativity to solve problems or really to do

anything...I’ve always liked drawing. When I was in pre-k, I would just draw things. Some of my stuff would have three eyeballs, which didn’t make sense, but eventually I got better. My dad likes to draw, too, so I get my artistic kind of traits from him. My biggest struggle is probably

being organized, kind of staying on track and being, like, focused.”

Selvin

“My greatest passion is achieving all the goals I have in my life, and fighting until I get it...I want to achieve everything that I have goals for in my life, and that is the way that I will feel proud of myself. Until now

I have been having a lot of struggles but the realest struggle I have had is knowing how to deal with math. That’s the greatest struggle I

always have because it’s something that sometimes goes out of what I can deal with, and it’s really something I have to fight to get what I have to be and I know that it’s something really important in any career you take. It was really another challenge coming here and

starting a new system, starting with something that really, you don’t know. But it’s something really nice at the end, because even though it’s hard at some points, when you get what you have to be, it really feels like you’re proud of yourself because you’ve been through a lot

and then you get what not everyone gets to be.”

Wonder

“My greatest achievement is Blair hockey, because it’s very fun for me and I’ve been playing since I was very little. A flaw is Spanish, because another language for me wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be; it was actually very hard. I just started taking Spanish. I was born in America but my mom wasn’t and so therefore she just talked in her language,

Ewe, from Ghana, so it was a struggle for me to learn English, and then learning Spanish on top of that was just like, really...I don’t know ewe

at all, but I don’t really hope to learn it. If I can learn Spanish, I’d like to do that, yeah.”

Eleanor

“So I think that my biggest passion is helping other people. I really want to be a doctor when I grow up, and do Doctors Without Borders or something in the places that really really need it. And so I guess that’s

one of my driving passions in school, like I want to do really well so that I can basically contribute as much in the future as I can. I think that my biggest struggle at this point is, I guess, figuring out how to

manage the pressures of everything that I do, and just like dealing with school stress, and relationship stress, and family stress, in a healthy

way where it doesn’t just become overwhelming.”

Jason

“My greatest passion is soccer. I love to play it, and no matter what, I will always love to play, if I’m hurt or not. I mean, into soccer... I never really learned [how to play] it; my dad played it, so I guess I got it from

him. I just played and never quit. My greatest struggle is probably making money, because I do not like asking my parents for money, so I

try to make my own money and I try to work for it. I have a job, but I barely work, and I try to get more than one job, but I currently only

have one, at Aeropostale. It’s fun, the managers are cool, but it’s hard working, because of course I have to work.”

Yuchabel

"My biggest passions, as of right now, are BNC and Infoflow, because they're so close to my career choice in the future and what I want to be. They have really opened my mind to hosting and doing things in

media and editing, and being behind the scenes sometimes. So they've really brought me further, and I can’t wait to do more things in my

future about things that are relevant to BNC and Infoflow and media production and journalism and stuff. My biggest struggle right now, okay...yesterday, my biggest struggle was my face because I have eczema and it’s starting to really react, but that thing is starting to

clear up today, my reaction! So I don’t know what my biggest struggle right now is, you know, I guess just being a teenager. And you know,

just being the coolest person I am!"

Tatiana

"So basically, I’ve realized over the years how much I love traveling and how it actually has an impact on how I see the world, because living in America and Maryland is so different than going into a new country. I’ve traveled to Nicaragua and Japan, which are both part of

my ethnicity, both I’m mixed with, and I get to see how different people live, new and different languages, different cultures, different ways of life, different food. So you live in Japan and people there are

very polite and courteous. They’re very germaphobic, like about staying healthy and also having light skin, but then you go to

Nicaragua and people are in the sun the whole day, from sunrise to sunset, and they’re tan and they cook their own food and they have their own livestock, and then it’s just different ways of living. Like I

lived in a house with new technology and toilets that could wash you, like a new style of toilets, and then you go to Nicaragua and the toilet isn’t even in the house. And when you get to come back, and get to

come home, and tell your friends about experiences, it kind of changes

you, because you come home and then you appreciate what you don’t usually appreciate."

Nkosi

“So, my biggest passion, strongest passion, is film and photography. I have been doing both for years now, since I was a little kid, and you

know, I just really have strong feelings for those. Once you start photography, you see a lot of things different, and a lot of things that you don’t really know, the whole world just looks different. Just like,

mostly architecture...buildings, the shape of buildings, what paint, stuff like that, like, architecture, is the biggest change when I started

photography because I saw everything differently, especially places in DC and when I traveled to Europe. It was just, a lot of things looked different, and it was very...beautiful. Girls are just like, ‘what?!’, the

beauty just comes so differently now, you know.”

Jake

“I guess my greatest passion is just creating things of all sorts, specifically music and drawings and t-shirts. I don’t know, I just like

creating a lot of different things, I guess. Hm, I don’t really know what else to say about my passion...I guess the really cool thing about it is

that naturally, like I said, I just love creating things, so most of the things come pretty naturally. Not necessarily the talents, but if you

love doing stuff, you’re going to get good at it, the more you do it. You know, that’s what the world is about, you have to practice to get good at stuff obviously. So I mean, you get pencils when you’re young; I got

a pencil when I was 4 years old, and then I liked drawing, so I did it, that’s how you get good at it. Music, I discovered in 7th grade with a program on my computer. I don’t know, just stuff like that. And also I guess the world can be what you want it to be, which is just cool. My

greatest struggle has been coming to terms with the world around me. I mean, everyone has to do that in their life. But just in terms of, trying to live life the best possible way...specifically coming to terms with, my

brother died, it’s just a hard thing to know what to do about...I don’t know. I don’t have much else to say about it. Life is a struggle and a

beautiful thing. Tragic and beautiful at the same time.”