It was June 2013 when Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist, inspired by the work of the Everyday Africa project, registered the Instagram account @everydayasia. As a Delhi-based freelance photographer, he saw a chance to carve out a space similar to the @everydayafrica feed, which showcases mobile photography that captures familiar moments, even mundane ones, to counter a media narrative too often shaped by images of extreme famine and poverty.
The first photo Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist posted showed a man, weathered by India’s sun, holding an umbrella that didn’t quite shade him. He was standing on a busy street and seemed to be reaching out to a woman in a magenta tank top and long yellow scarf, a polka-dot bag slung over her shoulder.
“A couple waits for a shared auto rickshaw in Imphal, Manipur, India. #everydayasia…,” the caption read. Amid the heat, the crowd and the traffic, Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist had spied a tender moment. Maybe the man was reaching for an embrace. Maybe he was attempting to pull his companion to safety. Maybe he was just gesturing. Regardless, the scene is instantly familiar: the futile umbrella, the misery of crowded places, that feigned patience while unable to hail a cab.
It got him thinking about the Everyday Africa feed. “It was just a moment where I thought, ‘Why hasn’t this been replicated?’ ” he said.
Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist, whose work appears predominantly in Al Jazeera and The Wall Street Journal, said Instagram provided the platform through which such a moment could find an audience.
“Instagram is amazing because people get to choose what they want to take in, and people don’t always want the blood and the gore, the heart-wrenching moments,” he said. “Sometimes they want small instances of love and joy and finality.”
For nine months, that photo remained @everydayasia’s solitary offering. Unsure of how to proceed, Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist continued freelancing and working on projects, until one day he received an email from Peter DiCampo, a co-founder of the very same Instagram feed that first inspired his project.
“Straight off, he was like: ‘We should talk about this. What were you thinking about trying?’ ” Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist recalled.
Connecting via Skype, the two established the critical framework to get the feed off the ground. They set up submission guidelines and aesthetic aims and discussed where those aims should resemble the goals of Everyday Africa, and where they should diverge.
Whereas Everyday Africa’s street-style aesthetic is informed by counteracting perceptions created by extreme media images, it was decided in the end that Everyday Asia should challenge viewers’ expectations differently.
“There are many different narratives that come out of Asia, but I’d say two of the big ones are stories of economic gain — people becoming rich, or people getting evicted because of new wealth — or this exoticism, where people say, ‘Oh, look at this really strange and colorful festival they have,’ ” Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist said.
Everyday Asia now has 12 regular contributors, a group that Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist has deliberately kept small so that everyone’s work can be included. In choosing his contributors, he gravitated toward thoughtful local photographers whose feeds on Instagram showed they “weren’t looking for the most obvious shot.”
The Everyday approach has continued to mobilize since its inception in 2012. Mr. Jansen-Lonnquist delights in the movement, which now includes Everyday Eastern Europe and Everyday Middle East, and said he hoped it might promote curiosity.
“Even on well-worn paths, we miss things. We overlook,” he said. “I think it’s important to revisit what we assume we know about. In Everyday Asia we can admit that we don’t know everything about Asia and are working through this process of discovery as well.”
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