Sigh

I know a ton of you must have seen these tweets that spoke negatively about my character and @getpishure.

I find it unfair that a very open conversation with all the winners has been misinterpreted in this manner, pulling away from the original intent for this. https://twitter.com/awelewaofficia/status/1380403914034581504

I started @getpishure as a commitment to provide access to carefully curated, high-quality, and beautiful Nigerian photos to designers, writers, artists, programmers, and other creators, for free.

This has been something that I and a small team have taken on to do.

Earlier in the year, and totally unrelated to @getpishure, I thought to give out my personal camera because it would be better used in the hands of a budding photographer.

So I posted on Twitter that I would be giving my camera away.

The goal was to give it to the person with the most convincing reason. The post received many responses deserving of the camera, and it was going to be a hard task to pick a winner, but we went at it anyway, working with the team to sieve through the many responses.

Thankfully, at the same time, some brands also reached out to partner with me on the giveaway. They gave me discounted prices for some photography equipment and support gear, and I was able to extend the giveaway to more people, I mean, that was my original intent, to support.

Charles Awelewa ( @awelewaofficia) was one of the winners.

It occurred to me as an afterthought that this could help @getishure's vision to provide beautiful Nigerian imagery for free. So I met with the winners over a call 2 days ago to work through the details as a conversation

to get a sense of what they willing to contribute in terms of photos, none of this was made to exploit anyone, it was a simple conversation and I remember Charles ( @awelewaofficia) saying he didn't mind contributing 35 pictures per month, and I promised to get back in a week.

It is important to note that every photographer that contributes to @getpishure gets full credit for their pictures. Every photographer gets their profile and can see the stats on what they own.

We planned the call as a discovery session to get a sense of what we could achieve.

Barely 48 hours after this meeting, I came online, just like the rest of you, to see @awelewaofficia accusations.

While I believe they are products of a misunderstanding, they are still very deeply hurtful. Because I mean, I had no intent to exploit him or anyone for that matter

As of yesterday night, we were on cordial terms on Twitter DMs. I would have expected that if he had any concerns, he would come directly to me first.

If he had come to me, I would have provided more context. I mean, these were my DMs, I didn't think we would devolve to this.

That said, I didn't think we were on this trajectory and it deeply saddens me that my intentions have evolved into random strangers calling me names on the internet, but I can take that.

I respect his decision to turn this down and wish him the very best going forward.