Can a picture SNAPPED quickly on a phone change the way we see an entire continent? The pair behind EVERYDAY AFRICA and their 168,000 followers think so.
There’s a man in an elevator wearing a striped polo shirt. Nothing too special, just a bit of the everyday. But the symmetry in the mirror behind him and the reflection of the others in the lift caught the eye of professional photojournalist Peter DiCampo.
A shot like that could have been taken anywhere but Peter snapped it while on assignment in the Ivory Coast in March 2012. Actually, just before he started the assignment.
Cape Town, South Africa. February 2015. Photo by Sam Vox. I met her at Woodstock, Cape Town. She lives with her family in this abandoned building. Just after this photo she rushed off to help her husband carry some plastic bottles and cans to the recycling center. She is her own hero! Photo by Sam Vox
“We were on our way to get our press passes and I thought, for a simple picture of a guy in a mirror, I don’t want to get kicked out right before I’m about to get my press pass,” he laughs.
“So instead of lifting my big professional camera, I pulled out my phone and shot really quickly.” Within a few hours, he was showing the image to Austin Merrill, also on assignment in the region, and the pair knew they were onto something.
“We were there doing a post-crisis story,” says Austin. “This place was struggling to recover from a conflict and it was an important story, it was under-reported and needed more coverage and yet, in the process of being there reporting, it was frustrating because we found ourselves contributing to the stereotypes of that part of the world. That ‘Africa’s nothing more than a place that’s driven by conflict and beleaguered by disease and poverty’ and things like that.”
Welcomed by a Masai in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Nairobi, Kenya. December 2014. Photo by Guillaume Bonn.
Having both lived on the continent for about four years, initially as Peace Corps volunteers and later as journalists, Peter and Austin were familiar with the other side of the continent, the one rarely shown in mainstream media.
“We pulled out our iPhones and started taking pictures of everyday life and found pretty quick these photographs were doing a better job of telling the story of this part of the world in a more complete way,” says Austin, adding they’re not actively ignoring the bad news of the continent, just showing it “alongside images of people in a shopping mall or going to work or in a classroom studying for an exam or at a fashion show. So you get a more textured and broader and deeper perspective on what the variety of life is like.”
We pulled out our iPhones and started taking pictures of everyday life and found pretty quick these photographs were doing a better job of telling the story of this part of the world in a more complete way
Hussein reigns in his water buffaloes while his sister Asmaa passes on her donkey in Tunis Village, Fayoum, Egypt. Photo by Christina Rizk.
What started as the two taking pictures and sharing them with each other quickly became a Tumblr, then an Instagram account and now it’s exploded into an educational program, gallery showings and more than 20 spin-off Instagram accounts, spurring the decision to begin a not-for-profit called The Everyday Projects.
“People have asked us at various points, ‘why aren’t you trademarking this stuff’ or ‘you should franchise this’ or ‘you could make a bundle of money’. Well, how do you own ‘everyday’?” says Austin.
But, the project has never been an attempt to make a profit. Most of their funding is project-based, coming from organisations such as the Pulitzer Center and Open Society Foundations. One of the projects, an eight-week curriculum with middle school students in The Bronx last year, has since been replicated in Chicago, Washington DC and Mombasa.
A woman uses her phone to photograph the canoe ride to Bojo Beach Resort in Kokrobite, Ghana. May 2014. Photo by Peter DiCampo
“Because our primary platform is Instagram, we realised we were hitting a lot of young, predominantly American youth, that were amazed, ‘Wow, this is what Africa looks like?’ and were having their perceptions changed at a very vital time when they’re forming their opinion of what the world looks like,” says Peter of the decision to branch into education.
“We get them to tell us their impressions of [Africa], then talk about why they have those impressions. Where do they get these ideas? That leads to a conversation about journalism, the media, the ways news stories get put together and the ways different parts of the world are depicted,” adds Austin.
“It’s an attempt to talk about perception, misperception and maybe most importantly, context. So people can see when Ebola or a civil war happens or a coup d’état, they’re devastating to those communities because for 95 per cent of the people, 95 per cent of the time, life is very normal and not that different from our lives. It’s just as devastating for those things to happen to them as it would be for it to happen to us in the parts of the world where we live.”
“It’s an attempt to talk about perception, misperception and maybe most importantly, context”.
These days the pair don’t manage the Everyday Africa account alone, instead official contributors share the reins.
“These are people we know and trust and whose work we have a lot of respect for. They have the log-on information to the Instagram account and when they come across an image, a scene they want to photograph that makes sense for Everyday Africa, they simply post it.
“The way Everyday Everywhere works is, whoever is logged in to the account, if they click that they like a photo on Instagram, that photo gets sucked into a Dropbox and the caption goes into a text file in that Dropbox. They clean it up a little and repost it to Everyday Everywhere,” explains Peter.
“That’s a way of having an umbrella Instagram feed that people can look at to see a ‘best of’ all our work.”
This article was written by Selise McLaggan and was originally published on The Collective, a monthly Australian magazine with a strong focus on people who are game-changers in their industry. The Vocal exclusively runs a feature from The Collective each month.
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