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An Asbury Park-based blog that features street portraits of people within city limits and couples them with short snippets of conversations had its first anniversary about a week ago.

The blog, Humans of Asbury Park, was created by 28-year-old Kamelia Ani [shown above]. Ani took her inspiration from the popular Humans of New York site and, with no formal training, bought a camera and took to the streets of Asbury Park to chat with random humans and share their mini-stories with the world.

She uploads the photos to the tumblr site, humansofap.com, as well as to the blog’s Instagram, Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Some 780 or so portraits later, Ani has amassed a nameless online photographic history of some of the city’s residents, business owners, visitors and other people she approaches. The only stipulation is they must giver her permission to take their picture and be somewhere in the city.

While Ani resides in Long Branch, she viewed Asbury Park as the most fitting nearby locale to base the blog.

“Asbury Park is just such a unique town,” she said. “It has its own vacuum of weirdness.”

Ani, a stay-at-home mother of three from an Orthodox Jewish background, said the project stemmed from an inner need to “get out there and see different ways of living and people.”

The point of the project is to show that, for as different as every human looks from an aesthetic perspective, and for as unique as their experience in the world is, most people have the same wants, needs, goals and dreams, she said.

“We all want to be loved, accepted. To leave a mark and make an impact on the world in some way, and to be able to express ourselves,” she said.

Many of the conversations she has had stick out in her mind, and the whole experience has had a significant impact on shifting the way Ani views the world.

“It’s changed me tremendously as a person,” she said. “Once you know people’s stories you still can’t judge them because there are so many factors that make them into who they are — we are all products of our environment.”

On one occasion, while walking down Main Street, Ani saw a man she thought was either homeless or on drugs, she said, so she passed him by operating under the assumption that he wouldn’t be able to provide her with a coherent answer. The man overheard her ask one of her questions to someone nearby, and told her he wanted to answer it. It turned out he was a construction worker on break, and that his biggest regret was that he was not able to see his daughter very often since she lives in Georgia.

“It’s such a great reminder,” she said. “You look at people and think you know their story, but you really don’t.”

A few months into the project, when the local press picked up on the story, Ani decided she would use the alias Kamelia Holdman, and would not allow anyone to take her photo.

After she began to feel like she was juggling the lives of two different people, she decided to shed the pseudonym — a tough decision that lost her a few friends in the Orthodox Jewish community she grew up in, which is part of the reason she chose to use an alias in the first place, she said.

“I was like, screw it,” she sad. “This is what I do, this is who I am and you can take it or leave it.”

Lately, people have begun to contact Ani through the blog site to ask if she will meet up with them or their friends to take their picture and put them on the site as gifts to their friends for their birthdays. She has so far made at least one person’s birthday wish come true, she said.

She will continue to maintain the blog as long as there are people in Asbury Park, she said, but has also begun a new photo project where she shoots people at a place that has had a significant impact on them. What she will do with that project remains to be seen.

Find Ani’s blog at humansofap.com.

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