James Barnor: Accra/London review – a tale of two cities in transition
Back in 1946, in Accra, the capital of Ghana, an adolescent James Barnor was teaching basket-weaving in a missionary school when his headmaster fatefully gifted him a Kodak Brownie 127. Barnor’s plans to become a policeman were hastily abandoned, as the plastic digicam set him on his path to becoming a renowned photographer. Little did he know, he would go on to cover a remarkable period in history; snapshotting the socio-cultural transition across two continents and two countries by focusing on two cities – post-independence Accra and post-war London.
James Barnor: Accra/London – A Retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery is the largest survey of his work to date and rightfully showcases a talent whose recognition is much overdue. The wide-ranging works are drawn from the Ghanaian-British photographer’s archive of approximately 32,000 images, spanning the climatic decades of 1950-1980 in both Accra and London through a medium of street photography, studio portraiture and photojournalism.
Frederick Seton James Barnor was born in 1929. After receiving his first digicam, he started to hone his craft under the watchful eye of his cousin J.P. Dodoo, a well-known portrait photographer. On finishing his apprenticeship, he established the Ever Young studio in 1953 in the Jamestown area of Accra.
Ever Young soon became a hive of activity, with all sorts of people buzzing about the place. Barnor himself likened the studio to “a community centre”, a place where civil servants, pastors and artists alike could engage in conversation and oscillate back and forth to the studio’s music. “My studio was at a spot where everything happened in Accra,” Barnor once said, “where young and old people met from various backgrounds, free to talk about everything and anything.”
Barnor refused to adopt the formal quality and rigid structure associated with large-format studio portraiture. Instead, he encouraged the sitter to move about, twist and turn, to capture their 360-degree motion. One can see this throughout the first section at the Serpentine – which is dedicated to portraits he took in Ever Young as well as his photojournalism. The three-part monochrome series “J Peter Dodoo Jnr, Yoga Student of “Mr Strong”” (1955) particularly stands out, where the student flexes his legs, back and chest, flaunting his athletic and lean physique; rejecting any staticity.
As you walk through the exhibition, you get to see the assignments Barnor undertook for the Daily Graphic, archiving key events and figures in the lead-up to Ghanaian independence in 1957. “I was the first newspaper photographer in Ghana, and I’m proud of that,” Barnor said. “Newspaper photography changed people’s lives, and it changed journalism in Ghana. I was part of this moment.”
During this epoch-making period, Barnor recorded intimate moments of luminaries and political figures. Everyone from Ghana’s first Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah to Richard Nixon feature in his photography.
In December 1959, Barnor moved to London to develop his art, working at Colour Processing Laboratories Ltd in Edenbridge, Kent. What better time to add splashes of colour to your work than when documenting the kaleidoscopic “swinging sixties”?
In these eye-catching portraits, Barnor harnesses the power of the lens to spotlight Black culture in Britain in the 1960s. Working for Drum, then the leading Anti-Apartheid magazine in Africa – Barnor worked as a fashion photographer with black models against the backdrop of London. His large and bold portraits of cover girl Erlin Irbeck – particularly the shot where she leans against a Jaguar in Kilburn – burst with vitality and encapsulate the youth-driven cultural revolution taking place at the time.
Memorably, there are also monochrome snapshots of BBC radio journalist Mike Eghan, a Ghanaian broadcaster, walking with arms wide at Piccadilly Circus and legends like Muhammad Ali moments before his match against Brian London at Earl’s Court.
It’s important to remember that Barnor captured these figures against a troubled background. Racial intolerance still loomed large after post-war migration, and violent attacks by white mobs continued throughout the decade – as seen in the 1958 Notting Hill Riots. Although Barnor’s portraiture has no obvious racial or implicitly political agenda, his photography throughout this period, of African and Afro-diasporic broadcasters, celebrities and models, feel particularly impactful given the turbulent context.
The third and final section of the exhibition is made up of colour photographs taken in post-colonial Ghana, on his return in the 1970s. Here Barnor set up the country’s first colour processing facilities and opened his portrait studio, Studio X23, in Accra. As you reach this part of the exhibition, you realise the stark juxtaposition from his pre-independence black-and-white shots in Accra to a transition into a post-independence polychromic explosion of colour, like something straight out of the Wizard of Oz.
These portraits exude a youthful excitement in the aftermath of independence and the use of colour speaks volumes. A stand-out candy cane portrait is “Sick Hagemeyer shop Assistant, Accra” (1971) as well as the portrait “Salah Day, Kokomlemle, Accra” (1973), which shows a young girl flaunting the bursting colour of her clothing otherwise muted by monochrome film. “Colour really changed people’s ideas about photography,” Barnor said. “Kente is Ghanian woven fabric with many different colours, and people wanted their photographs taken after church or in town wearing this cloth, so the news spread quickly.”
As a result of the global economic recession in the 1980s, Ghana’s economy collapsed, which made conditions difficult for Barnor to continue his photographic practice. In 1994, he finally settled back in West London, where he still resides today, aged 92. “Sometimes, the more you give, the more you get,” he said in a 2019 interview, “that’s why I’m still going at 90!” And that’s why you can find Barnor on Instagram.
All three sections of the exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery converge to become a powerful testimony to African and Afro-diasporic lives in both Accra and London. Barnor’s unique bond between photographer and subject evokes a sense of intimacy from portrait to portrait and from city to city. James Barnor: Accra/London is a visual tale of two countries in transition and a poignant homage to a talent that could capture the mood of two changing nations at the click of a shutter.