Humans of San Antonio

By Michael Cirlos

Along with the movement Humans of New York, a project to share the stories of New Yorkers, Humans of San Antonio is part of the Global Humans Project, a network of major cities around the world dedicated to capturing a glimpse into the lives of the everyday citizen. From Amsterdam to India to Rio de Janeiro, San Antonio joins the ranks of cities photographed and shown through social media to the rest of the world.

Michael Cirlos is the photojournalist behind Humans of San Antonio, a social media project founded in 2012 that combines photography and storytelling to promote the spirit of San Antonio's growing downtown community. Humans of San Antonio, the book, is the culmination of more than four years of photographs that highlight the people, culture, and vibrancy of San Antonio.

The city center is very important to San Antonio. It stands as the Alamo City's urban core; a hub that links the rest of the city to its heart. As a community that has weathered the national economic imbalance and proven itself a leader in urban redevelopment and 21-century innovation, San Antonio embraces change while continuing to celebrate the diversity, history, and individuality that makes it so completely unique.

Humans of San Antonio reflects the heart of San Antonio and symbolizes the importance of the people who make up its melting pot of cultures. Michael Cirlos's photography captures individual storytelling images in an unassuming, unscripted way to illustrate the essence of humanity. Each photograph tells the story of a citizen of downtown, and through images and his subject's own stories, Michael is able to communicate not just the human vulnerability to fear, sadness, and anger but also its resilience, strength, hope, tolerance, and perseverance. His unobtrusive nature, compassion and warmth, show how deeply committed he is to photographing the peak moments of San Antonio real life to humanize the individual and to collect flashes of culture.

Humans of San Antonio is at once uniquely individual as a photography collection while celebrating the international collaborative that forms its roots. Each personal history maps out the family, friends, and neighbors that populate a lifetime and encourages the reader to explore San Antonio's cultural differences by showcasing the diversity it honors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maverick Books
• Release date: Jun 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9781595347947

Michael Cirlos

Michael Cirlos's passion for photography developed in 2006 when he relocated to Hua Hin, Thailand, to study international relations at Webster University. After two years studying and exploring Southeast Asia, he was awarded the travel scholarship to continue his education and photography in Amsterdam. He returned to San Antonio in 2009. After graduating from the University of Texas at San Antonio, he began reporting on inner city culture and founded Humans of San Antonio. His work has appeared in regionally on Kens 5 and Univision 41 and in the San Antonio Express News, the Rivard Report, the Lake Front, Muze Collective Magazine, Centro San Antonio, and San Antonio Magazine. In 2015 he was selected to participate in the Mountain Workshops School of Photojournalism, where he studied under Rick Loomis, a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist of the Los Angeles Times.

Book preview

Introduction

Today we define San Antonio as a city on the rise. New housing on the River Walk and along Broadway has made urban living possible. The revitalization of city parks and even the changing skyline are indicators of a brighter downtown.

When I was a teenager, in the early 2000s, I would have loved the interconnect–edness of the community, the public art, and even the street food, but San Antonio was a different city. As my dear friend Valerie said back then, San Antonio is a place to exist, not a place to truly live.

I knew that if I wanted to experience more art and urbanism, I had to leave. In 2005 I moved to Hua Hin, Thailand, to study international relations and psychology at Webster University. Two years later I earned a scholarship to continue my studies at Webster University Leiden, in the Netherlands. My flat was about a mile from the university, and during my morning walks to class I occasionally took photos on Haarlemmerstraat. Eventually, in 2009, I transferred to the University of Texas at San Antonio.

One day, in the summer of 2012, I met a friend for a drink at the Flying Saucer. She had grown tired of hearing me talk about the absence of a larger art community and San Antonio’s poor after-hours mass transit. She pulled up the Humans of New York webpage on her phone and showed it to me. That’s when it began to dawn on me that I could raise awareness of my own city’s urban landscape and celebrate its diversity and inclusion. I could do San Antonio’s version of the Humans project. I’d document the authenticity of our community and show the rest of San Antonio that downtown was the place to be.

That October I bought my first D-SLR camera and began to photograph and interview people downtown—sometimes during my lunch hour but mostly after work or on weekends. At first I felt awkward asking people personal questions about their lives, and I wasn’t sure how Humans of San Antonio would turn out. Street photography didn’t seem to be common in the city. Sometimes I felt like giving up. But the more I photographed, the fewer obstacles I encountered and the more comfortable I became with my camera.

The images I took for Humans of San Antonio in the first week have left the biggest impression on me even