By Caryn Altman
Photo by Caryn Altman
Towson University freshman Jenna Barry-Utzig has always loved to talk to people.
“When I was little I would see people sitting alone at lunch and I would go up to them and be like, ‘Look, you’re sitting alone,’” said Barry-Utzig, a pre-mass communications major. “I would see if they were OK, and that’s how I made a lot of my friends.”
It’s no surprise that given how much Barry-Utzig loves talking to people that she now spends her days walking around the Towson campus hearing the stories and taking pictures of Towson students and posting them on her Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook page, Humans of Towson.
Humans of Towson is a spin-off of the Internet phenomenon Humans of New York, where photojournalist Brandon Stanton goes around New York City interviewing and photographing complete strangers and then posting his interviews on Facebook and Instagram.
Barry-Utzig stumbled across Humans of New York the summer before she came to college and decided she wanted to bring it to the Towson campus.
“Honestly, when I think about it, coming into college, I don’t think that I planned any of this, “Barry-Utzig said. “I had the idea of doing something like this, but it was over the summer that I stumbled across Humans of New York. I hadn’t been a fan for that long, but I really liked what he did. I really liked that he took pictures of people and then just talked to strangers. That is something that I would do.”
Humans of Towson originally began in early September 2014, but Barry-Utzig learned shortly thereafter that a group of Towson students had already created a Humans of Towson with a following of more than 500 people for an honors seminar. After finding out about the other group, Barry- Utzig and the students from the honors seminar decided to collaborate.
Oumou Diallo, a sophomore business administration major at Towson who is also Barry-Utzig’s self-proclaimed mentor, helped her make the decision to start collaborating with the other group of students.
“When I was telling Jenna about my interview with Humans of Towson I said to her, ‘You should join because it’s already in existence,’” Diallo said. “When Jenna told me that she had decided to join, I walked her through the whole process of regaining things because they wanted her to do things their way and they would shut her ideas out.”
After a lot of differences within the group, Barry-Utzig decided to go her own way with Humans of Towson.
“I told them that I was going to just branch off and stick to my Instagram one,” Barry-Utzig said. “Then I made a new Facebook and a Tumblr for Humans of TU. I didn’t mean to steal their idea. I just wanted to make a better version of it.”
As Humans of Towson started to gain a bigger following, Barry-Utzig posted an advertisement on the Humans of TU Instagram looking for photographers to help her.
“My mom actually brought to my attention that Humans of Towson needed a photographer after she saw their Instagram post,” said Dana Bowman, a freshmen pre-nursing major. “I sent her [Barry-Utzig] some shots of my friends that I’ve taken and told her, ‘I’m not a photography major and I just do this for fun.’ Then she messaged me that she really liked my pictures, asked what my schedule was like, and that’s how it happened.”
A day of interviewing includes Barry-Utzig walking around campus with one of her six photographers and going up to random people on campus to talk.
“I will typically have my photographer go up to the person and start the conversation [and] then I will come in and start to explain my project,” Barry-Utzig said. “Interviews typically last between 10 and 20 minutes. I will just be like, ‘So what’s going on in life?’ and they’ll go into how their mom just had cancer and I’m like ‘wow’ and I will try to go off of that.”
Barry-Utzig’s calm demeanor is what makes her interviews so successful.
She [Barry-Utzig] just seems to always know how to talk to people and the right thing to say,” Bowman said. “I’ve done a few interviews with her and the way she gets on the persons same wavelength is so impressive. People just tend to want to open up to her.”
Barry-Utzig has a lot of plans to help Humans of Towson grow, including making T-shirts, using Humans of Towson as advertising for prospective students and one day expanding her project to the greater Towson area.
”I definitely want to do new things with it and I am not going to give up on any of it until I reach my goal,” she said. “I keep thinking four years ahead about what I am going to do when I graduate. I promise that I am not going to give this away to just anyone.”