Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa: Portland Museum of Art

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.