Impressionable Everyday Photos

Think about that for a minute. You have all sorts of impressions of a place you’ve never been because of what journalists and photographers in shiny magazines have shown you. What if you saw the everyday images more prevalently than the exception-in-time photos? What if you heard about the family’s daily activities instead of the bomb raids and de-tusked elephants? Does it occur to you that Africa has cities with office buildings and people who go to malls? We never see that side of Africa. How would you think differently about a far away place if you weren’t given a specific impression by the imagery we’ve been shown in media?

 

Documentary photographer Peter DiCampo spoke at the conference I went to last weekend. These were the questions he posed. His talk lit me up because these are exactly the kind of photos I like taking most when I travel. So I revisited a small section of my old piles of images from my first trip to Nepal, ignoring the grand mountainscapes and flag-laden bridges, yaks and monkeys, and tourist destinations. Everyday life in a foreign place is incredible!

These are the images that have always been most interesting to me anyway, so I was excited to go back through and re-look with that focus in mind. Here are a few. More to come soon.