Images of Africa in world press photo

Abstract

This chapter explores how Africa is imagined and represented in Western media. It uses World Press Photo (WPP) as its institutional frame of reference. Basing its analysis on representations of Africa in international photography competitions, the chapter argues that the winning images of Africa in WPP’s annual competition matter because visual journalism is one of the spaces in which popular geopolitical imaginations of Africa are produced, circulated, and sustained. While acknowledging the persistence of a colonial image of Africa as a paradigm of failure, lack, and pathology, the chapter does find evidence of photo journalism chipping away at the edifice of Afro-pessimism. Such signs of change point to possible broader transformations in geopolitical representations of Africa in the global imagination.