LibGuides: Africa Primary Sources: Images, Videos & Art

Images, Videos & Art

ARTstor (available from JSTOR) This link opens in a new window
High resolution digital images for instruction, study, and research in the arts, architecture, humanities and social sciences. Images have been contributed by museums, scholarly collections, photo archives, and artists' estates. Pre-history-21st century. When prompted, create an ARTstor login or use your existing ARTstor login for access.
As of August 2024, Artstor content and key functionality are now accessed from JSTOR.

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960
The collection depicts the breadth of African experience; documents African life; European life in Africa in all its manifestations; and the African landscape, in particular as it changed over time. Included are photographs showing the building of East Africa’s railways, the growth of its urban centers and the development of European colonial administration. There are outstanding examples of portraiture. The collection provides an unsurpassed resource for the study of the history of photography in East Africa.
Smithsonian Natural Museum of African Art
At the National Museum of African Art, we inspire conversations about the beauty, power, and diversity of African arts and cultures worldwide. Browse the Collection and discover the myriad art forms—sculpture, photographs, paintings, drawings, textiles, jewelry, and sound- and time-based media—and materials—wood, ceramics, metal, glass, fiber, paper, ivory, bone, and mixed media—that await you
The Great Sahel Drought
11 photographs during West African drought
Africa Online Digital Library
AODL provides free universal access to cultural heritage materials from and about African countries and communities. It brings together tens of thousands of digitized photographs, videos, archival documents, maps, interviews and oral histories in numerous African languages, many of which are contained in curated thematic galleries and teaching resources.
Pre-Colonial Africa: Society, Polity, Culture
This website is a digital archive for hundreds of historical images, paintings, lithographs, and photographs illustrating enslaved Africans and their descendants before c. 1900.
Art and Life in Africa
Choose from countries, time periods, cultural events to find images, essays and sculpture representations.
G.I. Jones Photographic Archive Southeastern Nigeria Art & Cutlure
The art of Southeastern Nigeria in the 1930s
Poster Collection at Herskovits Library of African Studies Northwestern University
Posters representing a variety of social, political, and cultural issues, including public health, education, liberation and independence, political campaigns, the anti-apartheid movement, Biafra, Darfur, economics, art, publishing, and music.
AGSL Digital Photo Archive: Africa
Presents a selection of images from the extensive photographic holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library.
Africana Post Card Collection
Throughout the period of European colonialism in Africa, postcards played an important role in popularizing the venture of European colonial rule and in perpetuating long-held stereotypes of the vast African continent.
Africa Through a Lens
From the UK National Archives. Explore incredible photographs spanning over 100 years of African history, from the 1860s onwards, taken from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office photographic collection (CO 1069).
African Rock Art Digital Archive
a substantial collection of historical documents, photographs, redrawings and slides in addition to its large working collection of slides, tracings and redrawings
Art of the Asante Kingdom from the Met
The art of Asante, like that of all Akan peoples, wove together the verbal and the visual by illustrating spoken proverbs that communicated accepted truths and practical advice. In courtly art, verbal motifs relating to the cohesion and prosperity of the kingdom were used extensively.
The Met African Art
Works from across the African subcontinent span fired clay figures shaped in present-day Nigeria as early as 500 B.C. to the fiber creation Bleu no. 1 (2014) by contemporary innovator Abdoulaye Konaté. Major forms of visual expression surveyed relate to traditions of portraiture, dynastic succession, generational rites of passage, ancestor veneration, healing and divination, and theatrical performance
Africa in the Photobook
The website is about the changing visual representation of Africa as expressed through the medium of the photobook

African Ark: people and ancient cultures of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa by Graham Hancock (Text by); Carol Beckwith; Angela Fisher (Photographer)

Center for Religion and Civic Culture International Mission Photography Archive
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.