Todd Webb is largely known for his skillful photographic documentation of everyday life and architecture in cities, most notably New York and Paris, as well as his photographs of the American West. This new book showcases a different side of Webb’s work, taken from an assignment that took him to eight African countries.

In 1958, Webb was invited by the United Nations to document Togoland (now Togo), Ghana, Kenya, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi), Somaliland (now Somalia), Sudan, Tanganyika and Zanzibar (now merged as Tanzania) over a five-month assignment. Equipped with three cameras and briefed to document industrial progress, he returned with approximately 1,500 colour negatives, but less than twenty of them were published, in black and white, by the United Nations Department of Public Information. The archive was then lost for over fifty years and was only rediscovered by the Todd Webb Archive in 2017.

Todd Webb in Africa includes over 150 striking colour photographs from Webb’s African United Nations assignment. This book, and an accompanying touring exhibition, provides expert insight into Webb’s images with contributions by both African and American scholars. Accompanying essays place the photographs in their historical and artistic moment, and provide crucial insight into the role of photography in visualizing national independence and ingrained imperialism.

This edited volume considers the many ways in which landscape (seen and unseen) is fundamental to placemaking, colonial settlement, and identity formation. Collectively, the book's authors map a constellation of interlocking photographic histories and survey practices, decentering Europe as the origin of camera-based surveillance. The volume charts a conversation across continents - connecting Europe, Africa, the Arab World, Asia, and the Americas. It does not segregate places, histories, and traditions but rather puts them in dialogue with one another, establishing solidarity across ever-shifting national, linguistic, racial, religious, and ethnic. Refusing the neat organization of survey photographs into national or imperial narratives, these essays celebrate the messy, cross-cultural reverberations of landscape over the past 170 years. Considering the visual, social, and historical networks in which these images circulate, this anthology connects the many entangled and political histories of photography in order to reframe survey practices and the multidimensionality of landscape as an international phenomenon. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, history of photography, and landscape history.