The missionary venture was saturated by images. This is not only evident in the image collections of many missionary or colonial archives, but also in the visual dimensions of various types of printed sources, e. g. missionary periodicals. But how can historical images, which were produced, valued, reproduced, distributed and collected in (colonial) missionary contexts, be used as sources and how can the historical roles and functions of images within and beyond the missionary venture be examined? Which questions can be answered by analyzing missionary images? Which approaches or methods are particularly useful? These are the main questions tackled by this essay. Drawing on Deborah Poole’s model of a ‘visual economy’ as well as on some recent contributions to the field, it pleads for the careful contextualization of individual or serial image analyses, paying central attention not only to the materiality of images, but also to the social contexts of their (re-)production and use.