Color image of two girls wearing yellow dresses on a beach; a black and white dog in the LL corner

Untitled (44UN-7930-609), Somaliland (Somalia), 1958

Todd Webb

Archival pigment print

Courtesy of the Todd Webb Archive L2020.85.81

Not on View

Webb encountered some difficulty in photographing citizens of Somaliland (Somalia), as many were apparently resistant to his requests for posing. This photograph of two brilliantly dressed young women striding confidently along a wide strip of sand, an expanse of ocean visible behind them, provides a dramatic exception to his catalogue. Like Webb’s portrait of the man in the red suit in Mogadishu, the women’s casual demeanor and fashionable dress would have been received as images of the increasingly modernized, urbane population sought after by U.N. publications.

Image: In Copyright. Courtesy of the Todd Webb Archive

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