My research examines the visual politics of interwar French colonial propaganda, and the ways authorities used photography as a central tool for the attempted formation of a visual empire. I focus on the production and reception of colonial photographic propaganda to determine how state-sponsored photographs became official colonial information in the minds of many French citizens and irrefutable evidence of the civilizing mission. In my dissertation, I also examine transnational instances of photographic resistance to the French Empire in both Senegal and metropolitan France; where various photographic realities of empire coexisted.