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Factreton, Cape Town, South Africa | May 2, 2013 - The funeral service for Desmond Abrahams, 48, who lived with his brother and had no connections with local gangs. Desmond and two others were shot the head at point blank by members of the 28’s Prions gang just after midnight on the 20th of April. Two of the three men shot that night died and the third fell into a coma. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #capeflats #southafrica
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Cape Town, South Africa | April 14, 2013 - A cold front coming off the Atlantic Ocean forms a cloud wall. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #greenpoint
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Cape Town, South Africa | March 27, 2013 - Legend has it that when the “table-cloth” forms on top of Table Mountain, it means that once again the Devil and Van Hunks are having a smoking contest. It is said that in the 1700s the Devil challenged an old retired pirate called Van Hunks to a tobacco smoking competition. Van Hunks, a lover of tobacco and a tough old man, won the contest but the Devil, angered by his defeat, still continues to challenge Van Hunks to repeat the duel. Whenever they do, the smoke from their pipes creates the famous “table-cloth” clouds over Table Mountain. Photo by @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #tablemountain #vanhunk #tablecloth
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Cape Town, South Africa | January 2, 2013 - Dancers sing dance as their troupe marches through the streets of Cape Town as part of the 2013 Cape Town Minstrel Carnival. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #MinstrelCarnival
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South Africa was recently called the most financially unequal place on Earth in a report released by Oxfam in January 2013.
Cape Town, South Africa | January 28, 2013 - Bongani Gezane, 25, eats a leftover pizza given to him by a car stopped at the intersection he sells comedy pamphlets at. When given food, he tries to eat it immediately as an expression of gratitude. On a good day Bongani will make R100 ($11.00) and on a bad day roughly R15/$1.65. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @Charlieshoemaker @oxfamamerica #CapeTown #SouthAfrica
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Cape Town, South Africa | December 2, 2012 - Students from Arise ‘n’ Hoop practice with live fire for the first time on Clifton Beach sunday night. The Group will be competing in the World Hoop Day competition on 12-12-12 in Cape Town. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #cliftonbeach
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Cape Town, South Africa | February 20, 2013 - A band made up of members from the Democratic Republic of the Congo plays Soukous music, a popular Congolese music that originated in the 1940s, in a hallway for a small group of people. The band sang songs in Lingala, Swahili, and French. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #Soukous #longstreet
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Cape Town, South Africa | February 17, 2013 -Excited fans cheer on the legendary South African saxophone player Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse at the weekly Sunday concerts at Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #Kirstenbosch #siphomabuse #hotstix #siphohotstix
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Cape Town, South Africa | February 4, 2013 - A group of students walk to the train station in high winds on Monday afternoon. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #capetown #southafrica #students
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Cape Town, South Africa | February 2, 2013 - Members of the Golden Classic’s choir, from Matroosfontein, wait to go on stage at the Keep The Dream Malay Choir Forum held at the Good Hope Center. The Cape Malay community in Cape Town are decedents of political dissidents, Muslim religious leaders, and slaves from south east Asia who were forcibly brought to South Africa during Dutch rule starting in 1654. Nazeem Martin, the official singing coach of the Golden Classic’s says about the choirs, “What is very important is that none of these guys that are singing here can actually read music. And you will find that even 80% of the coaches coaching them, can not read music. So it’s a cultural thing…like an athlete that can run without being trained.” Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @Charlieshoemaker #capetown #SouthAfrica #choir #goodhopecenter #goldenclassics #TheGoldenClassics
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Cape Town, South Africa | January 30, 2013 - A group of local fishermen bring in their catch of Yellowtails at Fish Hoek beach. The large fish can be sold locally for R200 ($22.00) and the smaller for about R125 ($14.00). The fisherman pictured brought in about 200 Yellowtails in their nets. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @Charlieshoemaker #CapeTown #SouthAfrica #fishhoek #fishhoekbeach #yellowtail
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Cape Town, South Africa| January 26, 2013 A group of boys relax against the wall of Vygekraal Stadium in Athlone during the final day of the 2013 Minstrel Carnival. The Carnival is an annual month long tradition in Cape Town where local troupes compete for best troupe. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @Charlieshoemaker #CapeTown #SouthAfrica #Athlone #Carnival
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The Ken Fac troupe, from Kensington, marched through the streets of Parkwood this afternoon before attending the final completion of the 2013 Minstrel Carnival in Athlone. The day started great for Ken Fac placing second overall in the carnival but ended horribly when one of their members was stabbed to death on their bus enroute to the after celebration. The stabbing was done by a group of youth trying to get a free ride on their bus that had no affiliation with them. January 26, 2013. Photo by Charlie Shoemaker @charlieshoemaker #kenfac #capetown #southafrica
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A group of friends exit the car to talk with a group of girls outside of their home. Khayelitsha Township, December 15, 2012. Photo by @charlieshoemaker #khayelitsha #southafrica #capetown
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A billboard in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, showing Didier Drogba, the Ivorian striker and captain of the national soccer team. Drogba and the Elephants are the favorites to win this year’s Africa Cup of Nations, which begins today in South Africa. Ivory Coast has been the favorite for the last several Cups of Nations, but always comes up short. “This year we will win,” a man told me in Abidjan. “Our troubles are behind us.” Photo taken January 12, 2013, by @austin_merrill. #ivorycoast #soccer #football #caf #caf2013 #can2013 #afcon #afcon2013 #africacupofnations #cupofnations #cupofnations2013 #drogba #didierdrogba #abidjan #leselephants #elephants #southafrica #africa #streetphotography
The common media image of the African continent is one of extremes - but how can we identify the extremes without first establishing the norms? Everyday Africa is a collection of daily life images from across the continent, focusing on the mundane and the familiar. As journalists who have lived or spent significant amounts of time on the continent, we find the extreme not nearly as prevalent as the everyday.
www.everydayafricaproject.com
Find us on Instagram, @everydayafrica
Contact us: everydayafrica@gmail.com
Conceived by Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill, the project has grown to include work from the following contributors:
Glenna Gordon
Jane Hahn
Idil Ibrahim
Shannon Jensen
Krisanne Johnson and My Future, My Voice, a class that teaches photography to Swaziland teenagers
Lindsay Mackenzie
Holly Pickett
Charlie Shoemaker
Nichole Sobecki
Laura El-Tantawy
With editorial assistance by Stephen Mayes / VII Photo Agency and Sara Terry / The Aftermath Project.
This project was initially conceived during a trip to Ivory Coast that was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Featured in:
Around the World With Christiane Amanpour (ABC News / Yahoo! News)
The New Yorker Photo Booth
The New York Times Lens Blog
Bloomberg Businessweek
Salon
Guernica
From a blog post by Peter on our Pulitzer Center project page:
It begins on an elevator, as we ascend through a government building to pick up our press passes. I suppose part of the beauty of photographing with a phone is that you can start working before you’re issued a press pass.
For each project I photograph, there is always one image that makes everything click in my brain; one image that makes me realize what the story or theme is. In this case, the epiphany was that there need not always be a theme. Often my work as a photojournalist seems surprisingly, even dangerously, predetermined. We know the story we have been sent to cover, and we edit ourselves to tell that story even as we shoot. In this case, for example, I was in Ivory Coast to investigate a conflict I had witnessed the tail end of one year before – and the cocoa trade that feeds it, and uncertain steps being taken to resolve it. Subconsciously or not, I looked for photos that told that story.
And so it seemed that the other photos I was making simultaneously – on a silly phone with a silly “app” – began to feel more honest in their experiential nature. Sometimes we shoot without a theme. I notice the man on the elevator, the symmetry of the men around him and their reflections, the row of lights above his head. The picture is interesting in its mundane-ness, and therein lies the truth. Africa can be the place of extremes that we in the West see so often. Inundated with images of incredible poverty; occasionally we also see vast wealth. But Africa can be familiar. It can also, thankfully, be boring.
In this context, everything becomes important. The blur of a man in a bookstore, the row of young men lined up to read the daily paper. One morning, with an egg sandwich in one hand and a phone in the other, I snap a photo of a young Guinean girl walking through curtains. Her parents own the breakfast joint we frequent. Two hours and ten minutes later, a man wipes the snot from a young boy’s face. I can’t understand his language but I know what is being said. “This visitor is photographing you. Look your best.”
As we line up waiting for the UN to return the refugees to their homes, I’m torn. Which to photograph, the sad faces peering through the windows – so reminiscent of the forlorn images I’ve come to expect from this corner from the world – or the men standing, laughing, poring over DVDs for sale, deciding which Hollywood film to spend their money on. Which shoot-em-up blockbuster should be the first that they watch after they get back to their village and rebuild their homes, that they will purchase with the UN’s readjustment allowance?
It’s jarring. Sometimes I don’t think we let it jar us enough. We find the palatable in these situations. Refugees, we think, should be heavy with the terrible burden of all they’ve seen, weary with the miles they’ve walked to flee this place – not smiling and posing with the silly foreigner who appears with a camera.
I’m wandering in a village that was, unlike the others, only recently destroyed. Burning through rolls of film to make evidence that the conflict may not yet be over – and then four young men come by laughing, and they stand with their arms crossed in the shade of a tree, and they make a camera motion with their hands. Snap snap snap, and later I scrawl into a notebook, ‘we may never understand this place.’
I’m wandering in a shopping mall, a plantation, a border crossing, a harbor, an airport terminal. As a photographer, it seems to exist all for me to point at and snap. But it’s not for me. It’s Africa, everyday.
