Now, four years after its conception, the project has nearly 300 thousand Instagram followers and has expanded to include works from 18 different photographers, some of whom were born in Africa themselves.Įveryday Africa isn’t stopping with social media, though. That is generally all we think about when we think of Africa…and that can change.”Ĭhange is what Everyday Africa is all about. Then they go into what I call the Lion King category and start listing animals. “They say ‘poverty,’ ‘conflict,’ ‘disease,’ the word ‘Ebola’ is thrown out, followed by the word ‘AIDS’.

what word first comes to mind when they hear Africa,” DiCampo told TIME last year. “We’ve asked several thousands of Middle School and High School students in the U.S. Between the serious stuff, they started photographing the mundane, personal moments that they saw happening around them. The pair stumbled into the idea of the Everyday Africa while they were covering a story on violence, refugees, and rape victims in the Ivory Coast. It’s an issue close to Merrill and DiCampo’s hearts. Launched in 2012 on Tumblr and Instagram by photojournalists Austin Merrill and Peter DiCampo, the project “aims to fill in the gaps of news reporting that fail to shed light on everyday life in Africa.” Point being: Africa is vast, it contains multitudes.Įnter the Everyday Africa project. To try to sum it up with one simple image is like saying a McDonald’s in an Omaha strip mall offers a comprehensive representation of America’s landscape. But we’re talking about a continent with more than three times the area of the continental U.S. Some still just think of the Serengeti - lions, acacia trees, croc-infested rivers - when they think of Africa. For as much as the internet has made the world feel smaller, general knowledge of other cultures doesn’t seem to have increased much.

The Mind behind the Eye by Joseph Green