Credit: Peter DiCampo
What started off as a simple snapshot of everyday life soon became a global movement that’s shifting attitudes around the world. Now Everyday Africa have launched their first photo book, documenting the highlights of their first four years in action.
Photo by Tom Saater
Photo by Sam Vox
Within a few hours, Austin and I were poring over pictures we had shot on our phones that day, and the name Everyday Africa popped into my head and stuck there. Within a few months, we had a popular Instagram feed and an ever-growing group of contributing photographers, all passionately dedicated to sharing a view of the continent that goes beyond the media’s extreme stereotypes. In those early moments, we never could have imagined how far this movement would spread.
Photo by Peter DiCampo
Photo by Peter DiCampo
Photo by Edward Echwalu
For me, photographing everyday Africa meant shooting photos throughout my day, giving as much weight to the mall where I bought my SIM card as to the refugee camp I might visit on assignment that day.
It meant balancing the scales of what we see from the continent, showing the positive and, yes, even the mundane as much as we show the negative (if not more).
Photo by Jana Asenbrennerova
Photo byHolly Pickett
Photo by Guillaume Bonn
Our forthcoming book is a collaboration with the most vital people involved with the project: our followers. In addition to some 300 photographs, the book will draw from Instagram commentary that is in turn honest, shocking, funny, heartfelt and at times caustic. Through these conversations, I have learned that a project on the everyday does not mean a project that stresses similarities with the Western world. My favorite conversations challenge our idea of what is ‘normal’.
We’ve come a long way, and we still have a long way to go.
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