Every day for the past nine years, the Instagram account Everyday Bronx has posted an image that captures some sense of the borough. There are pictures of people playing basketball, cinematic shots of the greenery in a park, and countless images of community members walking past a favorite bodega, catching the train or crowding into a church.
On Friday, an exhibition featuring more than 250 images from the account will open at the Bronx Documentary Center. An opening reception that evening will include music, breakdancing and graffiti art, emphasizing the borough’s contributions to hip-hop as the genre’s 50th anniversary draws near.
"We really want to basically show the uniqueness and diversity and complexity that's in the Bronx," Everyday Bronx founder Rhynna Santos said.
Rhynna Santos, who launched Everyday Bronx in 2014, says the account is meant to dispel negative impressions about the borough. “We really want to basically show the uniqueness and diversity and complexity that's in the Bronx, that you don't usually see because we've been maligned with so many horrific negative stereotypes throughout the decades,” Santos said. “I want to try to do something to show the opposite of that – to show the reality of what it is to live here.”
The account, which has over 43,000 followers, is part of a larger network of storytelling communities called The Everyday Projects, which confront negative perceptions about people and places around the world. The projects began in 2012, when Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill started Everyday Africa to show life on the continent more accurately.
“They really wanted to fight the really horrific stereotypes of the entire continent of Africa with these images documenting everyday life,” Santos said. “So that sparked all of these other projects.”
Every day for the past nine years, the Instagram account Everyday Bronx has posted an image that captures some sense of the borough.
Santos, who was born in Puerto Rico, took a personal interest in changing impressions about the Bronx. She has deep roots in the borough, where her grandparents and father moved in the early 1940s, and where she graduated from high school. Santos has lived in different places around the world, and says she encountered negative perceptions of the Bronx wherever she went.
“When people asked me where I was from, I would say the Bronx, and I would get the same reaction, which was really negative,” she said. “And these are from people that mostly never even set foot in the Bronx.”
For the Bronx account, Santos and a small group of volunteers choose from photographs posted by Instagram users with an “Everyday Bronx” hashtag. The subjects of the images vary, and include people skateboarding, a couple embracing, and even an early glimpse of gentrification.
Both the Instagram feed Everyday Bronx and a new exhibition of its images are meant to dispel negative stereotypes about the borough.
Contributors say they hope the Instagram account and exhibition can help eradicate misconceptions of a run-down, crime-filled borough, which hasn’t been the Bronx's reality for some time now.
Ed Garcia Conde has been photographing the borough since 2009, when he founded the website Welcome2TheBronx. He says he’d always encountered the perception that if someone moved out of the borough they’d “made it.” Conde personally experienced that while living in the East Village and Midtown after college, but says it never felt right.
“You are a stranger in your own building,” Conde said. “No one would say hi to you in the elevator. You would take an elevator like 15 flights, and everyone's in the elevator just like keeping to themselves and not even chatting with you. I come from a neighborhood in the Bronx that, despite all the ills that were happening and plaguing the borough, people say hi to you.”
Photographers who contribute to Everyday Bronx illustrate the borough's complexity with nuance.
Another contributor, Michael Young, says it took moving to the Bronx 23 years ago for him to undo his own biases. He moved to the borough when Brooklyn became too expensive for his growing family.
“We saw all of these different things in the news: burned out buildings, and all the abandoned buildings, and just like it looked like a wasteland,” Young said. “It just never looked like a place that you would really want to live.”
His feelings began to change, he says, once he picked up a camera. “I noticed that I was drawn a lot to the graffiti and to urban landscapes,” Young said. “As I evolved and progressed, I became more of a street photographer, and these were the streets that I was living in. I had been in instances where I lived in places that I didn't necessarily want to be, but I learned to embrace where I was.”
Families, children and connections among neighbors are evident in many of the photographs shared on Everyday Bronx.
Young says he doesn’t want to shy away from life’s harsh realities, but believes he can balance showing the good and the bad through his photographs.
“I hope that I'm communicating to other people outside of the Bronx, and to other places, that this is a place that they should come and experience for themselves,” he said. “There's a lot of beauty that can be found here.”
Santos agrees. “I met the best people I've ever met here,” she said. “I've laughed harder here than I have anywhere else in the world. And more importantly, I felt that I was part of a community here. I felt welcomed here over and over again.”
The Everyday Bronx exhibition opens at the Bronx Documentary Center on Friday, March 31, and runs through May 14.
