Picturing African Futures: Photography, Education and International Understanding in a UNESCO Poster Set

In the 1950s and 1960s, UNESCO produced a series of photographic poster sets on topics such as cross-cultural understanding, education, human rights, literacy, and the rights of children. The series brought the utility of the reproducible paper exhibition format together with the idea of education for international understanding that was central to the UNESCO mission, and reflected the organization’s engagement with postwar humanistic photography. After mapping the wider context of UN photography within which the series was developed, this article takes a poster set from 1963 on the development of educational futures in Africa as a frame through which to view UNESCO’s photographic internationalism in the context of decolonization. ‘Africa: Challenge for the Future’ navigates between an acknowledgment of independence and agency on the part of African nations and a mode of visualization addressed to non-African audiences–nascent world citizens–who were invited to empathize with the photographic subjects and support the continent’s development. Reading the selection of photographs alongside archival records that re-situate them in their original contexts of production, the article examines the cultural and educational work that that the photographs were being asked to do alongside dissonant meanings that emerge from the archive.