Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

In its earliest days, photography was seen as depicting its subjects with such objectivity as to be inherently free of ideological bias. Today we are rightly more skeptical — at least most of the time. When it comes to photography from the past, we tend to set some of our skepticism aside. But should we?

In Light on Darkness? T. Jack Thompson, a leading historian of African Christianity, revisits the body of photography generated by British missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteen...