Josiane Faubert is the founder and CEO of PICHA, a stock agency that focuses on work by and about people from Afrocentric communities. PICHA has partnered with Adobe since 2017. This is her story.
I started PICHA out of frustration and with a clear mission of curating images that reflected positive experiences within the communities we serve, backed up by a community of creatives sharing the same vision. There were too many negative images of Africans, of Black people, and there is a big need for authentic representation on the continent. Another frustration was the realization that the few great images of Africans had been made by foreigners, depriving the continent once again of the benefit of its own resources.
I have experienced first-hand the power of a ‘dominant culture,’ the power of negative visual representation in movies, the news, and music. I was born and raised in Gabon, moved to France as a teenager, and then moved to the U.S. as a young adult. My parents had never traveled to the U.S., and their perceptions and views of America were through the lens of the media. As I ventured myself into the unknown, my parents’ last bits of advice were, “don’t touch any drug; be careful; they have guns there, they kill each other.”
After living in a hotel for a month, I called my parents to inform them I had found an apartment in Brooklyn. My mother almost had a heart attack. Brooklyn back then was way too synonymous with violence. Yes, there was violence in Brooklyn, but also a lot more life, but she did not know that.
Fortunately for both my parents, they got to discover America and learned to appreciate it as a country full of extremes.
My own experiences in the world made me realize that Afrocentric communities share so many things in common. The diversity of the African diaspora is hard to ignore, and some of our artists were also part of this diaspora. It became natural to extend our mission to all Afrocentric communities as well.
The last unfortunate events leading to the death of George Floyd have re-ignited in me the full weight of PICHA’s mission. We are here to change the narrative, break stereotypes. It really goes beyond creating beautiful content. I understand that we all have biases, but when these biases are taking people to the grave, it has to stop. We all know very well the power of an image.