When we started working on the concept for HUMANS, one of the driving forces behind the idea for me always was and is the very limited picture we get about Africa, it’s countries, the lifes of the people, the cultures and so on. The reporting between Safari and fancy holiday resorts and the catastrophies of war, Aids, famines, corruption and so on, was not at all fitting into what I experienced and what people told me. Obviously this parts are a part of the lifes of many and especially the stories about the things that go wrong are very important stories to be told, but I believe that for the understanding we need more – a fuller, richer picture that covers not only this stories but also the normal life, the good stories, the stories of innovation, success and the things people in the western world could learn from a lot. Maybe this richer picture will also lead to a new perception for this continent and with that also a higher awareness for it’s problems. First, because it is easier to relate to when your picture is not only about something far away from your own reality, but second also we get a deeper understanding what allows to put things better into perspective.

The writer/photographer duo Brandan Bannon and Mike Pflanz tried exactly that with their project about Nairobi. They devoted the whole month of April to tell different stories from there. Every day they posted a new story on their blog, both with pictures and text, covering stories from food costs, streetkids to mobile phone use and car ownership. They wanted to capture a glimpse into the variety of this megapolis on the rise. In their own words:

Daily Dispatches: Nairobi is an innovative exploration through photojournalism of a fast-evolving 21st-century African city, unfolding day by day in real time. We will spend each day of April searching out stories from all corners of Kenya’s capital, stories which will paint a compelling, informative and surprising portrait of the city, and the lives lived by those who call it home. Each day, we will send our images and reports back to a series of US universities and colleges we’re working with, who will in turn print them and mount them in an exhibition which grows day by day.

Make sure to take a few minutes and check out the stories they covered in their project and get a deeper insight into the life in todays Nairobi.

It is obvious that news don’t have the capacity to cover this broad spectrum of stories and when we look in other parts of the world, exactly the same happens. A friend came back from Japan recently and what he told was quite different to the picture we get in the news right now. It is a problem and an advantage of news to cover the stories when they unfold, but when this is the only picture we get it creates misunderstandings and misperceptions of the countries, the lifes of the people and at the end also the reality. What projects like Daily Dispatches or also our project HUMANS can do is not to replace classic coverage and storytelling, but to add some layers that are hard to add in normal coverage and through that help to create less narrow-sighted pictures of the places we hear about.