American photographer Todd Webb (1905-2000) didn’t get his start until later in life; after working as a banker, he lost everything in the 1929 crash and eked out a meager living West, first as first a gold prospector then a forest ranger. In 1934, he returned to his native Detroit to work for automobile manufacturer Chrysler, which donated a camera that Webb used on a trip to Panama.
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Upon his return, Webb joined the Detroit Camera Club, where he met lifelong friendHarry Callahan, who he would go on to live with when he moved to New York in 1945 to become a professional photographer. Well enmeshed in the city’s booming postwar cultural scene, Webb’s career took off. In 1955 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to create a portrait of the United States while walking coast to coast — the same year Robert Frank made The Americans.
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In 1958, the United Nations commissioned Webb to travel across eight countries in Africa over the course of five months to document the industry, technology, and modernization at the dawn of the African Independence Movement. The photographs, long lost, have just been unearthed in the new book and exhibition, Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame.
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