Vibrant Photos Capture Everyday Life Across Africa
A new book shows a kaleidoscope of moments from around the continent.
ByAlexa Keefe
Published June 15, 2017
• 2 min read
All captions were provided by the photographers.
When the Everyday Africa Instagram feed was launched in 2012 by Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill (both photographers and former Peace Corps volunteers), it was a new kind of experiment: what happens when you invite photographers who have the most experience with a place be the ones to show us what it really looks like?
Populated with images from African photographers and a few Westerners who have lived there, Everyday Africa is a panoply of images as diverse as the continent itself, creating an entirely different visual archive of a place that has been most often photographed from the outside looking in.
A selection of these images have been curated by DiCampo, Merrill, designer Teun van der Heijden and Ghanaian photographer Nana Kofi Acquah into a new book by the same name.
As Acquah writes in the introduction: "The Everyday Africa platform on Instagram may very well be the biggest new visual library of the continent. For the West, Everyday Africa has been enlightening, but for Africans, especially Africans in the diaspora, it has been inspiring: an affirmation of what they have always said about home. "
Follow Everyday Africa on Instagram. You may order the book here.
What the end of the war in Afghanistan means to one family
A year after U.S. troops pulled out of its longest war, National Geographic revisits an Afghan mother featured on the cover and her family’s experience offers a glimpse of life under Taliban rule.
