Beyond Stereotypes

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About Beyond Stereotypes

Our planet is a maelstrom of lifestyles, conditions, cultures and realities. Complex, vibrant and mind-boggling diversity exists within towns, cities and regions as much as across national borders. The world is a wonderfully confusing and ever-changing place, always defying easy explanation.

And yet we persist with simplistic categorizations of whole nations as either 'rich' or 'poor', as 'developed' or 'developing'. This reduces whole swaths of the world to identification according to what they don't have, rather than what they are. This approach writes off the messy, fluid realities of some societies as 'developed', as if they have nothing more to offer anyone besides a high GDP per capita. How utterly boring.

This group is for all those who want to move beyond this stereotyping of place by using the visual power of photography. Show a picture from Africa that is cheery and polished. Show one of a major 'developed' Western city that is chaotic, dirty and bursting at the seams. Show us something about your corner of the world the rest of us have been conditioned not to expect. Defy expectations and simplistic categorization. Go beyond touristic snaps of landmarks or famous skyscrapers and explore the other 99% of a place that people actually live in. Or, alternatively, show us a spiffy new development in a country where every other aspiring photographer is taking pictures of children in rags.

Let's move beyond this tendency to classify people and places in simplistic categories such as rich or poor, clean or dirty, backwards or modern (whatever that means), and simply celebrate life as it is on the bustling streets of the world.