The Arts Photography
There is an old African proverb that says: “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” Thankfully, the London-based, Ghanaian-born photographer, James Barnor, 81, a sprightly octogenarian, is belatedly being “discovered”. His first major exhibition of 60 years of work has received rave reviews in Britain. Kwaku reports.
Lucky Jim, still working at 81
A
fter a career spanning over 60 years, the first major exhi- bition of James Barnor’s work, “Ever Young: James Barnor” ran from September till late No-
vember last year at Rivington Place, the London visual arts venue designed by the fellow UK-based Ghanaian, David Adjaye. Te exhibition, documenting life in
Ghana from the late 1940s to 1950s, and African life during London’s swinging six- ties and later decades, received extensive coverage within the British press. It is likely to move to other parts of England in 2011. Born in 1929 in Accra, the capital of
the then Gold Coast (now Ghana), Barnor affectionately calls himself Lucky Jim. “Be- cause I was lucky to be alive when things were really happening,” says Barnor, “when Ghana was going to be independent and Ghana became independent, and when I came to England in the 1960s, the Beatles were around. Tings were happening in the 60s, so I call myself Lucky Jim.” Having known and taken intimate pho-
tographs of Gold Coast political activists, such as the lawyer and nationalist J.B. Danquah and the man who eventually became the President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, and the last British governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, as well as among others the Duchesss Of Kent, and the then American Vice Presi- dent Richard Nixon (when he attended Ghana’s independence ceremony in 1957), perhaps Barnor is justified in seeing him- self as lucky. His archive is a treasure trove
80 | April 2011 New African
documenting history in Ghana, where he started off, and Britain, where he now lives. Te number 9 allows him to provide a
quick CV. “I was born in Accra in 1929. In 1939 the war broke out – I was 10 and we had a historical earthquake in Accra. 1949: I finished my photography apprenticeship, and started on my own, and carried on until 1959, and then I came to England.” Asked why he picked photography as
a career, he said: “Photography was in my family. My two uncles were photogra- phers. My cousin was a photographer, and I found out later when I got into it that another cousin was also a photographer.” In 1947, he was apprenticed to one
cousin, who had studied with one of his uncles. When he finished his apprentice- ship, he applied to enter the police force as a photographer, but before he had got a reply, he started working as a freelance photographer. Which was just as well, because his
favourite relative, a grand aunt, did not want him to go into the police force, as she thought all he would be doing was photographing dead people, thieves, and accidents. Using both the cumbersome full plate
camera, which took one shot at a time on a fragile glass plate, and a small roll film camera, his experience stood him in good stead and he became the first photographer employed by the Daily Graphic newspaper in Accra, when it was set up in 1950. Tat made him Ghana’s first full-time news- paper photographer. “Tere were [other] newspapers, but they didn’t produce pic-
tures that needed a full-time photogra- pher,” Barnor explains. Indeed, before the newspaper was
launched, he had to take numerous photo- graphs in order to create the paper’s library. “I was a type of paparazzo, where you were collecting an archive of photographs of people to be used when the paper got go- ing,” recalls Barnor. “Some of them didn’t like to be photographed, so you had to find a way of photographing them. “At one time, I was taking photographs
at the race course in Accra, and there was a political big man. I caught him in such
James Barnor shows a photograph he took of the lawyer J.B. Danquah, later President of Ghana, who became a close friend
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