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Africana Primary Sources

How to Search for Albums and Photographs in NUsearch

When in NUsearch, click the "Advanced Search" option. Then input your search terms as follows:

  1. Indicate the subject of your search.
  2. Add a second subject of "photographs" or "pictorial works"
  3. Click the "Search" button.

Photographs in the Herskovits Library Collection

The Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960 
Assembled by the British collector Humphrey Winterton over about 30 years, 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. This website provides access to the Winterton Collection inventory and a sample of 101 images from the collection. When you view the images available on this site, you will find the album and image numbers from the inventory adjacent to the image.

The Vernon McKay Photographs
These visual images of African life were apparently collected by Vernon McKay. They comprise a portion of our Vernon McKay (1912-1988) Papers collection.

Justine Cordwell Collection (access restricted to Northwestern users only)

Cordwell was one of the first PhD students to enter the Program of African Studies(1948). The following year, in 1949, she set out for Western Africa to photograph wood carvers and other sculptors, essentially to conduct research for her dissertation. The majority of these images were taken on this trip, with the rest being taken on subsequent research trips. Cordwell traveled to Nigeria, Benin, and Ivory Coast to conduct research, funded by a Rockefeller grant. Recorded Nigerian locations include Lagos, as well as several smaller, remote, and even (formerly) tribal areas including Yoruba, Shagamu-Remo, Abeokuta City, Ijebo-Igbo, and Iperu. While there she visited various locations and photographed textiles, sculpture, pottery, metalwork, and other tribal art objects, as well as people going about their daily business, buildings, and infrastructure.

The E.H. Duckworth Photographic Archive (View the Finding Aid / Contents)
The E.H. Duckworth Photographic Archive contains more than 5,000 photos documenting Nigerian life in the decades just before independence. A British civil servant, Duckworth spent more than 20 years in Nigeria, where he was editor of and frequently a photographer for The Nigeria Magazine, which was founded to promote Nigerian national identity. His papers are now housed in the Bodleian Library's Commonwealth and African collections, but the photographs—plus several hundred glass lantern slides and thousands of original negatives—have spent most of the past 40 years packed up in the traveling trunks in which Duckworth shipped them back to England. The archive complements other colonial African photo collections in the Herskovits Library—notably the Winterton Collection of East African Photographs—in that it records images intended for an African, rather than colonial, audience.

Libraries Digital Collections

Photographs at Other Locations