Photograph: Courtesy October Gallery, London
In 1946, James Barnor was a teenager teaching basket-weaving in a missionary school in his native Ghana, when he was given a Kodak Baby Brownie camera by a fellow teacher. The following year, having abandoned plans to be a policeman, Barnor began an apprenticeship under his cousin, JP Dodoo, a local portrait photographer. So began the creative journey mapped out in this deftly curated retrospective of a pioneering African photographer who, aged 91, is finally receiving the attention he deserves.
Drawn from Barnor’s archive of around 32,000 images, the show spans 1950-80 and reflects the ease with which he moved between portraiture, photojournalism, fashion and music photography. More importantly, it acknowledges his importance as a photographer of the lives of ordinary Africans, in both his native Ghana and the diaspora in the UK. In the early 1950s, Barnor opened his wonderfully named Ever Young studio in Accra, which more than lived up to its name due to his deft retouching skills. “If someone came in, I’d make them look younger,” he recalls in an interview for the exhibition catalogue.
As several images here attest, the studio was also a meeting place and occasional party venue for local young people. Like his Malian contemporary, the late Malick Sidibé, Barnor was a young photographer in step with the emerging energy of the times, his more relaxed approach undercutting the often rigid formality of portraits produced by the few older studio photographers working in Accra. Outside the studio, he used a small, hand-held camera to shoot the world around him in a more free and candid style. It was a quietly revolutionary act in more ways than one. “At that time,” he says, “only English white people were photographers.”
As Barnor’s early monochrome images of local life show, his approach seemed to become more democratic as the country moved towards independence. He shot fishermen hauling boats from the sea, boxers training in a gym and shoppers queuing to board a bus. When Ghana finally achieved independence from Britain in 1957, Barnor had already established himself as the county’s first photojournalist. Working for the Daily Graphic newspaper, which was owned by the British Mirror group, he had access to local celebrities and politicians.
Barnor’s photojournalism from that tumultuous time is marked by an acute compositional eye: in one striking image taken at a National Independence Movement rally, the frame is filled by a single symbolic female figure in a white robe, whom he shot from behind to reveal the initials NIM painted on her bared shoulder. He also famously caught a besuited Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first prime minister, kicking a ball while wearing his emblematic prison graduate cap – he had been released from jail to become Ghana’s leader.
Ever restless, Barnor first moved to Britain in 1959, where he studied photography and worked for the pioneering South African magazine Drum. The exhibition features some wonderfully relaxed group images of his family and social circle in the 1960s, their outings to the countryside shot in an almost diaristic style. His formidable technical skill is more apparent in two hauntingly stark monochrome portraits: a looming Muhammad Ali in training for a British fight, and a young black pastor, half in shadow against a brick wall. Both are studies in mood and tone.
With his outsider’s curious eye, Barnor caught a country on the cusp of the swinging 60s, tentatively shedding its lingering postwar austerity. A photograph from 1960 of a long row of uniformed schoolgirls waiting for a bus on an empty street seems a world away from his fashion shots of models posing in Piccadilly Circus and Petticoat Lane a few years later. In an exhibition loaded with social and cultural signifiers, Barnor’s portraits of such black models as Erlin Ibreck and Marie Hallowi are particularly resonant, a dramatic counterpoint to the prevailing – and unquestioned – whiteness of the British fashion world at that time.
Barnor first studied colour photography in 1960 on a course at Rochester College of Art in Kent. In this, too, he was ahead of his time, returning to Ghana in 1970 to set up the country’s first colour processing lab. A portrait from that time, of a young Ghanaian woman surrounded by brightly coloured plastic containers, was originally made as a technical colour guide, but now suggests that Barnor was exploring the same terrain as American photographers of that time, most notably William Eggleston and Stephen Shore.
It is rare for a photographer to embrace so many genres and yet retain a visual signature, yet Barnor managed to do just that across the many decades he worked. This constantly surprising – and uplifting – exhibition is a map of a restless creative life lived between two countries, two cities and two cultures.
James Barnor: Accra/London: A Retrospective is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, until 22 October.
