Friday, February 7, 2025 at 13.00 EST • 18.00 GMT
Event held via Zoom • Registration Link
In the aftermath of the Second World War, as the Cold War took hold and many countries in the global south began to break free of colonial rule, the United States sought to promote its version of democracy across the world. In Africa, the U.S. Information Agency invested in a major program of activity within which photography served to imagine capitalist, consumerist, and democratic futures for the continent, modeled in its own image. Photographs depicted African visitors to the U.S. as they toured U.S. institutions of government, observed democratic politics in action, and were introduced to modern consumer products and lifestyles. From the mid-1950s, however, as African decolonization gathered pace and the U.S. civil rights movement took on new momentum, racial injustice presented an unprecedented challenge to this task, with images of racial violence circulating widely across the globe and undermining the image the U.S. sought to project. This presentation examines the ways in which the U.S. Information Agency responded to this challenge, seeking to incorporate the campaign for civil rights and racial integration into the narrative of U.S. democracy that it presented to the world, including, for example, the March on Washington (1963). The shape this coverage took was, at least in part, a response to its mission in Africa. For a brief period, civil rights protest was presented as a form of “democracy in action.”
Darren Newbury is Professor of Photographic History at the University of Brighton. He is the author of Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa (2009), People Apart: 1950s Cape Town Revisited. Photographs by Bryan Heseltine (2013) and Cold War Photographic Diplomacy: The US Information Agency and Africa (2024); and co-editor of The African Photographic Archive: Research and Curatorial Strategies (2015) and Women and Photography in Africa: Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges (2021). In 2020 he received the Royal Anthropological Institute Photography Committee Award for his contribution to the study of photography and anthropology.
Recommended reading:
Chapter 4: ‘“A Pleasant Mixture of Negro and White”: Photographing Civil Rights as Democracy in Action’, 119-68, in Darren Newbury, Cold War Photographic Diplomacy: The US Information Agency and Africa. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2024
To request a copy of this recommended reading, please email us.
Image credit: “Cameras, pennants and transistor radios, young and old, men and women; the Civil Rights March in Washington was a true reflection of the depth of democracy in America”. Photograph by Rowland Scherman. Faces of the March, 1963. USIA “Picture Story” Photographs, 1955–1984, RG306, NARA. 306-ST-821-63-4526.