In 1955, two photographers, Guggenheim Fellowships in their back pockets, set off across America. One was Robert Frank, who returned from his epic road trip with the 27,000-plus images he would draw from to make his soon-to-be-iconic book, The Americans. The other was Todd Webb.

Though he’s hardly a household name today, at the time Webb ran with New York City’s photo-fabulous crowd: Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Gordon Parks, and Berenice Abbott, among others. He shot for Fortune magazine here and there, but was less interested in commercial commissions than in making tender portraits of New York City and its hard-working inhabitants. And then, in 1958, Webb landed an ambitious assignment from the United Nations: a five-month, eight-country swing through Africa to capture a continent not only on the cusp of political independence but in the midst of seismic industrial and cultural transformation. Now, nearly 65 years later, Webb’s alluring, color-rich pictures—almost none of which have ever been seen before—are being published in a stunning new book, Todd Webb in Africa, out this week from Thames & Hudson.

That the book even exists is something of a miracle. After a transaction went awry in the mid ’70s, a dodgy art dealer ended up with the negatives from Webb’s Africa trip—along with a major swathe of his life’s work. It was only four years ago, thanks to the sleuthing of Betsy Evans Hunt—a gallery owner who befriended Webb a decade before his death in 2000—that the Africa negatives were rescued from five steamer trunks squirreled away in the basement of a collector’s home in the hills of Oakland, California.

Here, Hunt, the longtime executor of Webb’s estate, speaks with Vanity Fair about some of the book’s standout images.

Webb’s assignment was to bring back photographs of “the changing face of Africa.” And this he did—dramatic scenes of elections that upended colonial rule, bustling ports, and puffing copper mines. But he also shot plenty of film for himself, and sometimes the boundary between the two went wonderfully soft—as with this exuberant, beautifully framed image of a Texaco attendant in Togo. Flush with ’50s enthusiasm, he looks like a proud pumper in Anytown, U.S.A.—except, of course, for his sandals, the palm trees, the dirt driveway, and the “Prix à Payer” on the tank itself, all of which serves to make the picture intriguingly foreign and familiar.

Before Webb became a photographer, says Hunt, he’d worked as a gold prospector, a forest ranger, a stockbroker, and a middle manager at Chrysler in Detroit (where, in 1941, he began taking photography classes with a teacher named Ansel Adams). Thanks, perhaps, to this varied work life, “Webb always brought a sense of warmth to his photos of working people,” she says. While the book emphasizes that Webb was both white and an outsider to Africa—and that his images must be scrutinized as such—sometimes an outsider’s perspective can be enlightening. For proof, look no further than the Swiss-born Robert Frank’s piercing view of America.

Hunt has spent the last 30 years immersed in Webb’s entirely black-and-white archive, and until she laid eyes on these pictures, she “didn’t think Todd actually saw in color.” He wasn’t known for shooting fashion, either. But here it was: This picture, taken on a Somali beach, looks like a sparkling Slim Aarons set, with a pale blue sky, a light breeze, and two stylish women in gently flowing dresses literally cut from the same cloth.

For a photographer in 1958, shooting with expensive Kodacolor film on a months-long assignment was the sort of delicacy typically reserved for the elite shooters at Life and National Geographic. Webb clearly relished the opportunity, experiencing what Hunt calls, “an expansion of his voice and his vision.” And yet, of the more than 2,000 dazzling color pictures Webb brought back from Africa, the United Nations, not always the most artistically forward of organizations, published just 22—all of them in black-and-white.

The continent’s budding industrialization was changing the workforce, culture, and economy. It was also leaving its mark on the landscape. Here, molten slag cascades down the hill of a copper mine in Zambia. The image is smartly composed, but once you see the tiny human figure standing off to the side—and realize the three “thimbles” are each about 10 feet high—it’s also stomach-turning. Webb intentionally kept the brown dirt in the foreground to depict the “before” and “after” of this man-made toxic volcano.

What, exactly, is unrolling in this jubilant, unsettling, wildly surreal image? It was, as Webb wrote in one of the journals Hunt now has, “A day of great surprise—and rejoicing. The opposition has won a landslide victory and now Togo is virtually free…the country is in ecstasy.” People wore white in celebration; there were costumes and cries of freedom. “Everything is closed, and the people in holiday mood,” Webb wrote. “I feel that I have seen history made.” In the thick of this revelry, that Webb was able to find a frame in which the mask’s pink cheeks matched those pink blossoms is extraordinary.

“This was actually one of the first pictures I saw,” says Hunt, remembering the moment she peered into one of the steamer trunks that had been stashed in a collector’s junk-filled basement for 40 years. “I was like, Are you kidding me? Who’s ever seen a picture like this?!” The contents of the trunks—thousands of Webb’s vintage prints, negatives, journal pages, and 170 rolls of undeveloped film—had been purchased from an art dealer who, according to Hunt, took advantage of Webb’s gentle temperament. (For the rest of his life, Webb studiously avoided talking about the lost work.)

After tracking down the collector, it took Hunt the better part of a year to reach financial terms and rescue the archive. The basement was dry and, miraculously, the negatives had remained in good condition. (“It’s remarkable they survived at all,” says Sam Walker, who is the associate director of Webb’s archive. “If another decade or so had gone by, they could have been in really bad shape.”) But the basement was also dark, making the negatives hard to read in the moment. It was only when Hunt returned to her office in Portland, Maine, that she fully understood what she had recovered—and what Webb had lost. “I suddenly realized why Todd never wanted to talk about it, because this was his life's work. And it had been taken from him.”

It’s fair to say that Webb did not exactly blend in on his travels. Tanzania, where this picture of a roadside mural was made, was a racially stratified society with British colonizers at the top and Africans at the bottom. Webb’s UN assignment didn’t call for him to embed in the lives of the Africans he shot, and as for the Brits, he describes them in his journal as “monocle-wearing blokes…so intent on upholding the prestige of the British crown that they have illusions of royalty.”

But one way Webb often tapped a culture was through its quirky signs and posters—and this was as true of his pictures in New York and Paris as it was in Africa. (“Tailor is dead,” read a handwritten storefront sign in a 1946 photo Webb took in Harlem. “But business will be carried on as usual by son.”) He was also tight with Walker Evans, and was certainly aware of the power that Evans found in his own pictures of idiosyncratic vernacular expression. So it wasn’t surprising that when Webb found murals depicting daily life—cooking, healing, music-playing, and drinking—he stopped and made pictures.

Roy Stryker, who famously nurtured the careers of legendary photographers Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks at the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, later hired Webb to shoot for him at Standard Oil. While Webb had plenty of experience taking pictures of hulking ships, he was known for his ability to capture both scale and humanity, which you see in this picture of a buzzing harbor in Ghana: The massive logs spill out in front of us like matchsticks, but it’s the man in the white hat looking up at the tilting timber that jolts us with a sense of scale and awe.

Assignments for Standard Oil and Fortune magazine aside, Webb never had much money. “He was happiest walking the streets of New York with his large-format camera and tripod,” says Hunt. “But he could only afford to make four or five pictures a day, which meant he had to choose his places, his times, and his framing very deliberately.” In Africa, Webb decided to work with smaller, hand-held cameras (including a Rolleiflex and a Leica), but in this picture’s glorious geometry and careful composition, he clearly brought that same artful intentionality.

Webb’s images of Africa during a moment of political and economic promise have also become historically significant; in 1958, color film wasn’t regularly used in Africa to record daily life. In fact, Webb made his color images more than a decade before the great Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, who is interviewed in the book, opened the nation’s first color-processing lab in Ghana’s capital in 1970. (Barnor’s buoyant interview is the high point of the book’s otherwise academic and relentlessly contextualizing text.) Webb, we now know, had been hoping to make a book of his color pictures from Africa, but the publishing industry pretty much shrugged. “In his journal, Todd wrote that publishers wanted to see pictures of lions and women with bare breasts,” explains Hunt. “They weren’t interested in what an industrializing Africa looked like, in what a changing Africa looked like.”

What is easily the most intimate and enigmatic portrait in the book—one could spend hours trying to read the man’s expression—was an anomaly for Webb, whose on-the-street work didn’t often lend itself to the paused and posed moment. But here, Webb finds a man near a port in Sudan, his turban tight atop his head, his soft blue shirt echoing the dreamy sky. The picture’s magic, however, rests entirely in the eyes. “Clearly,” says Hunt, “the poetry of the place got under Todd’s skin.”

Bill Shapiro is the former editor in chief of Life magazine. The Minneapolis Institute of Art will be displaying dozens of Webb’s photos in a new show slated to open January 28^th, Todd Webb in Africa: Outside the Frame. 

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