Glimpses of everyday life in Africa.

Founded in 2012 by American writer Austin Merrill and photojournalist Peter DiCampo after an assignment took them to Ivory Coast in the wake of that country’s second civil war, Everyday Africa began as an Instagram feed dedicated to redressing the clichés that portray the continent as a place of mostly poverty, disease, and conflict. The snaps from their camera phones captured scenes of genuine, everyday life that, in DiCampo’s words, “stripped away a preconceived narrative” and presented a more rounded depiction of Africa’s 1.2 billion people than that seen in mainstream media. The project has since expanded into a collective of dozens of photographers, the best posts from whom have been recently compiled into a 448-page book called Everyday Africa:

30 Photographers Re-Picturing a Continent (Kehrer Verlag; US$40). Supplemented by a selection of the Instagram comments they sparked, these images, a handful of which are presented here, make even the most mundane moment seem extraordinary.

A street in the Atkilt Tera fruits and vegetables market of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, by local photographer Girma Berta.