Futures Past: Africa in the Cold War Photographic Archive
Professor Darren Newbury (University of Brighton)
Wednesday 26th April, 5:30- 7pm, 2023. G4, Grand Parade.
CMNH Seminar Series: Visual culture, history, and memory.
All Welcome, no need to book, just turn up. Drinks from 5pm.
To attend on line book here
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, African decolonisation precipitated a contest for influence on the continent by Cold War superpowers. One response of the US government was to mount a campaign of ‘photographic diplomacy’, through the United States Information Agency (USIA). The USIA program of photographic diplomacy in Africa had several dimensions: the practice of photographing the political, cultural and educational visits of Africans to the US, which provided a space for the imagination of international cooperation and friendship; the representation of civil rights struggle for international audiences, presented as an example of democracy in action; and picturing a world of integration and racial co-existence. Many of the photographs in this Cold War, neo-colonial archive are addressed to the future, whether that is the promise of independence or the development and modernisation that US support was envisaged to guarantee. Through multiple small acts of image making the agency responded to a changed world in an effort to imagine and order the future. It offered a visual guide to a series of answers ready-made for export to the continent and an invitation for postcolonial Africans to imagine their future in American terms. This presentation is based on extensive research in this Cold War photographic archive, it introduces the USIA and its visual program for Africa and analyses the agency’s output through a selection of photographs and picture stories.
