How is photography connected to global practices? This is a first edited collection to trace the relationship between history, photography and memory in a global perspective on three interrelated levels: firstly, in the artistic and cultural production of pictures, secondly, in the decoding of colonial and contemporary photography, and thirdly, in collecting photographs in picture archives dealing with colonial, anthropological and family photography. The contributions sketch the contested field of global photography and trace the manifold intertwinements between historical and contemporary photographs.