Cold War Photographic Diplomacy: Darren Newbury in Conversation with Kylie Thomas

This interview focuses on Cold War Photographic Diplomacy, a detailed study of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the vast archive of photographs it produced as part of its work in crafting political and social relations between the United States and newly decolonized African countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Newbury’s book illuminates the central place of race in the Cold War imagination in the time of anti-colonial struggle and decolonization in Africa, and the civil rights movement in the United States. When the USIA was shut down at the end of the Cold War, its photographic collection was transferred to the US National Archives, and effectively disappeared from view. In this interview, Kylie Thomas speaks with Darren Newbury about the material his study has brought to the surface, and about what it means to consider these images in the present.