Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa

March 24 through june 19, 2023

This exhibition presents a recently recovered photographic series made by American documentary photographer Todd Webb in 1958.

Commissioned by the United Nations Office of Information to document emerging industries and technologies in nine countries—Togo (then Togoland), Ghana, Sudan, Somalia (then Trust Territory of Somali land); Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi (then Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland); Tanzania and Kenya (then Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and Kenya)—Webb traveled for five months in the summer of 1958, amassing nearly 2,000 negatives. Webb photographed at a critical moment when colonialism and independence were intertwined in the region. His work raises questions about agency, racial and national privilege, and the many ways in which European and American powers attempted to define modernization in Africa's history. Despite devoting considerable resources to the project, the UN reproduced only 22 of Webb's images in a seven-page black-­and-white brochure titled ''A Continent Awakes: United Nations Photos, Supplement No. 7." Their neglect by the UN animates our interpretation of these images as well as our attempts to understand what is both inside and outside of the frame. In 2023, are we able to perform a kind of photographic recovery? What is the potential of this body of work to produce knowledge after remaining hidden for decades? This exhibition asks what happens when the uncomfortable legacy of colonial photography is reinterpreted by contemporary viewers from a historical distance.

“Visitors to the Webb show should pause by the entrance. A monitor shows a video that consists of interviews with 16 immigrants now living in the Portland area. They talk about their African past and American present. The stories they tell are moving and absorbing and very much outside any frame.” –Boston Globe

How can we create a bridge between present-day Portland and the photographs in Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa? In partnership with the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center, the Portland Museum of Art commissioned photographer Egide Foxworth to document community members with photographs brought from the African continent to Maine. This endeavor, conceived by the PMA’s Outside the Frame Advisory Committee, demonstrates how the mobility of photographs allows us to carry our histories, our communities, and our memories across time and geography.

This video was developed in partnership with the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center. All photography by Egide Foxworth.

Organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

The Portland Museum of Art’s presentation is organized by Anjuli Lebowitz, Judy Glickman Lauder Associate Curator of Photography, with consulting curator Erin Hyde Nolan, Bates College and Tufts University.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, which includes over 150 striking color photographs from Webb's United Nations assignment in Africa. This book provides insight into Webb's images with contributions by a group of international scholars. Included essays engage the photographs in their historical and artistic moments, and provide crucial insight into the role of photography in visualizing national independence and ingrained imperialism.

Banner image: Todd Webb (United States, 1905-2000), Untitled (44UN-8001-496), Somaliland (Somalia) (detail) [Man in red suit walking in Mogadishu], 1958, archival pigment print, 16 x 20 inches (image), 18 x 22 inches (sheet). © Todd Webb Archive. L2020.85.76.