Artist of the day: Artist of the day, June 6, James Barnor, a Ghanaian photographer (#712)

Thursday, June 6, 2019

Artist of the day, June 6, James Barnor, a Ghanaian photographer (#712)

James Barnor (1929) is a Ghanaian photographer who has been based in London, UK, since the 1990s. His career spans six decades, and although for much of that period his work was not widely known it has latterly been discovered by new audiences. In his street and studio photography Barnor represents societies in transition: Ghana moving toward Independence, and London becoming a multicultural metropolis. He has said: "...I was lucky to be alive when things were happening...when Ghana was going to be independent and Ghana became independent, and when I came to England the Beatles were around. Things were happening in the 60s, so I call myself Lucky Jim." He was Ghana's first full-time newspaper photographer in the 1950s, and he is credited with introducing colour processing to Ghana in the '70s.

Now an octogenarian, Barnor has spoken of how his work was rediscovered in 2007 during the "Ghana at 50" jubilee season by curator Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, who organised the first exhibition of his photographs at Black Cultural Archives (BCA). Appreciation of his work as a studio portraitist, photojournalist and Black lifestyle photographer has been further heightened since 2010 when a major solo retrospective exhibition of his photographs, Ever Young: James Barnor, was mounted at Rivington Place, London, followed by a series of exhibitions including in the United States and South Africa. His photographs were collated by the non-profit agency Autograph ABP during a four-year project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and in 2011 became part of the new Archive and Research Centre for Culturally Diverse Photography.

At the age of 17 Barnor was teaching basket weaving at a missionary school and the headmaster gave him a camera "to play around with––it was a Kodak Brownie 127, made of plastic". In 1947, Barnor started an apprenticeship with his cousin J. P. Dodoo, a well-known portrait photographer, "mostly taking pictures of people because when you take pictures of flowers and places there's nobody to pay for them. I did that for two years but I had always wanted to be a policeman. I applied to be a police photographer and was accepted, but before I could start my training my uncle gave me the camera he used for photography."

After finishing the apprenticeship set up his own freelance photographic practice in a makeshift street studio in the Jamestown area of the capital, using a backdrop outside his rented room. When his landlord wanted to reclaim the room, from 1953 Barnor began to operate his Ever Young Studio. Its name derives from the subject of an English comprehension extract he had studied as a schoolboy.

Located close to the once-famous Seaview Hotel, the studio "soon drew a mixture of clients from families to night revellers and dignitaries". Among those whom he photographed were Ghana's future first president Kwame Nkrumah, pan-Africanist politician J. B. Danquah, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke (last British governor of the Gold Coast), the Duchess of Kent and then American Vice-President Richard Nixon (when he attended Ghana's Independence ceremony in March 1957), as well as boxing champion Roy Ankrah.

At the same time as freelancing, Barnor became the first staff photographer employed by the Daily Graphic newspaper when it was established in Ghana in 1950 by Cecil King of the London Daily Mirror Group.

In December 1959 he travelled to England to develop his skills, working at Colour Processing Laboratories Ltd, and attending evening and other part-time classes before being awarded a Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board scholarship to study full-time at Medway College of Art in Rochester, Kent, graduating in 1961. Subsequent to this course, he stayed on in the UK and continued working as a photographer and technician. His images from this period document Africans in Britain, notably his work as a fashion photographer with black models against London backdrops, often for the covers of Drum, then the leading magazine in Africa.

"At the age of 79, I was recognised," he told his audience at a talk at Chelsea Theatre in 2013. His 85th birthday in June 2014 was marked with a showcase of his work in the London Borough of Hounslow, where he lives in sheltered accommodation.

In spring 2010, Barnor's first US exhibition was presented by Autograph ABP in association with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute in Boston at the Rudenstine Gallery, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University.

© 2019. All images are copyrighted © by James Barnor. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only.