Everyday Africa is a Tumblr that compiles pictures – altered via iPhone applications such as Instagram and Hipstamatic – of life in Africa. The project was started by a group of photographers looking to prove that these apps can be used in photojournalism. Critics believe these apps make photojournalism trivial, arguing that people become desensitized to pictures of natural disasters and poverty when they are thrown in with the heaps of food pictures and Sunday baseball outings prevalent on Instagram and the like.
It is exactly this reason that Everyday Africa was brought into being. The founding photographers believe that using the familiar phone apps will help to make African life seem more relatable, rather than using traditional “Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism,” which paint Africa as either hopeless or a continent budding out of hardship.
Guernica Magazine has interviewed one of the founding photographers, Peter DiCampo, about the project’s inception.
