Postcards from Africa — Photographers of the Colonial Era

This volume, published by MFA Publications, is part of the Darwin archive because it documents one of the earliest and most influential visual economies of Africa: the colonial postcard. Drawn primarily from the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Postcards from Africa brings together a complex and often unsettling body of imagery created between the 1900s and 1940s, when photographers—European, African, and otherwise—capitalised on a booming market for images of the continent.

These postcards circulated globally, reaching collectors who had never stepped foot in Africa, and became instruments of empire, aesthetics, and anthropology. The photographers behind them, often anonymous, worked under or adjacent to colonial power structures, producing images that projected tribal typologies, racial hierarchies, and exoticised identities. And yet, embedded within this archive are also traces of African agency—elites who understood the performative power of photography, individuals who used these images to shape their own representation.

The book includes a critical essay that interrogates these dualities and contradictions, asking who was behind the camera, who performed in front of it, and what remains legible today. It is not an uncomplicated document—but it is an essential one for understanding the entangled histories of photography and empire in Africa.

Technical Sheet

Title: Postcards from Africa — Photographers of the Colonial Era
Artist / Author: Various
Date: 2021
Technique / Printing Method: Photomechanical reproduction (postcard facsimiles)
Medium / Materials: Softcover
Dimensions (cm): 19.7 × 22.9
Pages: 148
Publisher / Editor: MFA Publications
Language: English
Condition: New