The International Mission Photography Archive offers historical images from Protestant and Catholic missionary collections in Britain, Norway, Germany and the United States. The photographs, which range in time from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, offer a visual record of missionary activities and experiences in Africa, China, Madagascar, India, Papua-New Guinea and the Caribbean. The photographs reveal the physical influence of missions, visible in mission compounds, churches and school buildings, as well as the cultural impact of mission teaching, religious practices and Western technology and fashions. Indigenous peoples’ responses to missions and the emergence of indigenous churches are represented, as are views of landscapes, cities and towns before and in the early stages of modern development.
The archive is hosted on the USC Digital Library website.
Click here to explore the International Mission Photography Archive.
To find out more, please contact Prof. Jon Miller, senior research associate and director of IMPA.
View the visual essay by Paul Jenkins, “Reading an image in the Other context.”
Click here to download a PDF report about IMPA
