The Everyday Projects 2022 Year in Review

2022 was a fantastic year for The Everyday Projects! We celebrated the 10th anniversary of Everyday Africa with a print sale featuring work from our contributors around the globe, we released a new curriculum, we produced another season of The Essentials, and so much more! Not to mention we grew our community of amazing photographers, who we just happen to think are the world's best!

Everyday Africa turns 10!

This past March marked the 10th anniversary of Everyday Africa, a milestone in our effort to expand visual storytelling and present a more accurate depiction of daily life around the world. What started with an image by Peter DiCampo in an elevator in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, has evolved into The Everyday Projects, which is made up of nearly 40 official feeds, more than 400 photographers, and tens of thousands of images.

Thanks so much to the many partners that we've collaborated with over the years, who have helped to make our work possible and impactful! And thanks to our ever-growing community for making this all possible! It’s an honor to work alongside you.

Check out this list of our accomplishments over the past 10 years!

We launched our new curriculum!

Our curriculum encourages middle and high school students to learn about stereotypes, photography, representation, journalism, and truth in storytelling. Over the course of ten classroom sessions, students gain a broader understanding of life around the world, and then apply those lessons to their own lives, telling the stories of their own communities through photography. See the full curriculum here -- and if you're a teacher, be sure to sign up at that link to get updates!

We partnered with Black Women Photographers for a weekend special of The Essentials Season 3!

For this year’s season, we held a two-day workshop with speakers who shared their incredible expertise on everything from pitching, getting assignments, and sustaining long-term projects to book-making, self-promotion, and side hustles.

You can watch all the classes here! And stay tuned, we will be translating and subtitling the classes this year as well.

We worked with NPR to publish: "Precious memories: 8 refugees share the things they brought to remind them of home"

At this time of unprecedented numbers of refugees around the world — a record 27.1 million in 2021 — we wanted to know what precious possessions refugees took with them as they sought to make a new home. In collaboration with NPR, photojournalists of The Everyday Projects interviewed and photographed eight refugees from different parts of the globe. Click here to read and see their stories — and the stories of their cherished objects.

We hosted our first ever print sale!

To celebrate the 10th anniversary, we partnered with Picto to offer a print sale of images made by photographers from Everyday Africa, the African Photojournalism Database (APJD), and other Everyday feeds around the world — all of which were inspired by Everyday Africa. 

A lot has changed in the last 10 years, including new and evolving initiatives that are aggressively taking on injustice and misperception in the media industry. We applaud these efforts and have been a part of many of them, but we also see real value in focusing on the simple thing we’ve done well since the beginning — taking a look at everyday life and making the mundane beautiful, through photography. 

We felt like this print sale really embraced our mission: Continuing to find the extreme not nearly as prevalent as the familiar, the everyday. 

We exhibited our grantee finalists and winners' work at Photoville 2022 and Oldenburg, Germany!

We were thrilled to once again show the work of Everyday Projects contributors at last year's Photoville and at a show in Oldenburg, Germany. We wanted to showcase the winners and finalists of our first-ever grant program, as their work and intentions echoed The Everyday Projects' values.

The 2021 winners were Tania Barrientos Radilla (Mexico) and Salih Basheer (Sudan), whose projects were deeply inspiring. Zohreh Sabaghnejad (Iran) won Honorable Mention. There were nine other finalists: Gabriella Báez (Puerto Rico), Grasielle Barbaresco (Brazil), Rehab Eldalil (Egypt), Amina Kadous (Egypt), DeLovie Kwagala (South Africa), Fawaz Oyedeji (Nigeria), Fethi Sahraoui (Algeria), Farshad Usyan (Afghanistan), and Andrés Yépez (Ecuador). 

And we want to say a very special thanks to our friends at PhotoWings, who partnered with us on our educational curriculum and a new season of "The Essentials" with Black Women Photographers.