Between 1907 and 1909, German photographer Robert Lohmeyer traveled through Togo, Cameroon, German Southwest Africa and German East Africa, producing the first color photographs of the German colonies. This film traces that journey using unpublished written sources and Lohmeyer's own images, showing how his meticulously planned photography books, seen by huge numbers of readers at the time, sold Germans a colonial idyll of a "peaceful savage" in a paradisiacal landscape. War, disease, hunger and forced labor are absent from the frames. Because the pictures were in color, audiences read them as authentic and true, which made the propaganda more effective than any painting or black-and-white photograph could be. Historians and researchers examine how Lohmeyer's PR campaign for empire shaped European perceptions of Africa for decades, and the film follows the afterlife of these images, many of which still circulate today, to argue that they helped lay a visual foundation for racism that persists into the present.