“I’m no expert,” Evans Hunt says, “but I knew right away these images were something special. In total, Webb spent five months journeying through the continent, taking approximately 2,000 photographs along the way. Independence would be won there just three years later. Most of July was spent in Tanzania: his photographs of it a mixture of lush landscapes, colonial structures, and some uncomfortable stares. “I liked Somalia,” he wrote, “made friends – fleeting ones – but firm – and I regret the fleetingness and the hopelessness of never seeing them again.”įrom there, Webb flew to Nairobi, before his whistle-stop tour of Zambia and Zimbabwe, then referred to as Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Over his two weeks in the capital Mogadishu, Webb shot oil harbours, daily life and cityscapes that still feel contemporary. May was spent in Sudan and Ghana, with him arriving by June in today’s Somalia. “The opposition has won a landslide victory and now Togo is virtually free,” Aside from a few, he noted, the country was in ecstasy: “The cry of ablode! rings in the streets.”Ī man spraying pesticide on a cocoa crop in Ghana in 1958. “A day of great surprise and rejoicing,” Webb wrote in his journal. After decades of colonial rule, its citizens were free to vote. Here, that same month, he witnessed the nation’s earliest elections, under UN supervision. Webb left New York for what was then Lomé, Togoland, on 11 April 1958 via London: he landed in what is today the Gambia before travelling over land to his first stop – Togoland, now Togo. He returned with portraits, burgeoning urban centres and natural landscapes the dregs of colonialism and the first signs of independence captured in vivid colour, as the shackles of empire were finally cast off. Webb had been sent by the United Nations to document industry, technology and modernisation in a continent in transition. Inside the envelopes were images Webb had taken on a five-month commission to what had then been eight African nations: today Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Togo. Photograph: © 2021 Todd Webb Archiveįor three days, Evans Hunt and her assistant scanned in these negatives, glued to their computers. Loading people and goods at Lomé harbor in Togoland (now Togo). “Among the vintage prints, memorabilia and negatives were several large envelopes, each labelled ‘Africa, 1958’.” “It wasn’t until I got everything back to our office in Maine that we could start to really comprehend it all,” she says five years later. After three trips, and hours of negotiations, the boxes were in Evans Hunt’s hands. And there, underneath one of their homes in California’s Oakland Hills – packed away in five large steamer trunks – she saw Webb’s lost archive for the first time. Evans Hunt’s detective work led her to a group of investors on the west coast, then in possession of what for so long had been missing. With Webb’s blessing – through his later years and after his death – she embarked on a mission: to manage what remained of his estate, and to track down the photographs he lost. Evans Hunt learned that a run-in with a dealer had separated Webb from much of his life’s work. In 1956, he was awarded a Guggenheim scholarship to document life in the United States by travelling across the country on foot. He worked for the United Nations and the Marshall Plan before moving back to America. Webb’s assignments for Standard Oil took him across the US and to Paris, where he later lived. Photograph: © 2021 Todd Webb ArchiveĮvans Hunt fell in love with Webb’s stories: of being tutored by Ansel Adams impressing Alfred Stieglitz days spent bonding with Georgia O’Keefe.
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