Remembering Ghana Through Barnor’s Lens
James Barnor, a 96-year-old Ghanaian photographer with an archive of more than 32,000 images, recalls in vivid detail life in the Gold Coast before independence and his encounters with Kwame Nkrumah, embodying a living memory of Ghana’s transformation. From his flat in an elderly-housing complex west of London, he can still describe how he once turned an aunt’s room into a darkroom and how a mentor’s letter urging him to move to London helped set his life’s trajectory between Accra and England.
The article situates Barnor as both historian and storyteller, a man who can identify the people in his photographs and narrate their lives — from airline workers to long-distance drivers — as if no time has passed. In the 1950s, as a staff photographer for Accra’s Daily Graphic, he documented the comings and goings at Parliament House, making himself a daily witness to Ghana’s early postcolonial politics and leaving behind images that function as a visual parliament of that era.
Barnor’s present life is quiet but observant: his living room overlooks a river, a bridge and a newly built storage facility whose construction he has watched and occasionally photographed with his phone. He now mainly photographs flowers and the view outside his window, yet he speaks of these modest digital snapshots with the same care he reserves for his studio portraits, street scenes and fashion images from decades past.
Born in 1929 in Accra’s Jamestown neighborhood, Barnor grew up in a family of image-makers but received his first camera — a Kodak Baby Brownie — from a schoolteacher. Leaving school early, he apprenticed at his cousin J.P. Dodoo’s studio, learning traditional large-format portrait methods before another cousin, Julius Aikins, introduced him to smaller roll-film cameras that allowed him to chase pictures outside the studio and laid the groundwork for his photojournalism.
His professional breakthrough came in 1950 when London’s Mirror Group launched the Daily Graphic in Accra and, on Dodoo’s recommendation, hired Barnor as its first staff photographer, effectively making him Ghana’s first photojournalist. As independence approached, he covered political rallies, sports and cultural events, while his Ever Young studio in Accra experimented with theatrical backdrops, props and cloud-painted walls that gave sitters a dreamlike, floating presence — some of those images now hang at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In late 1959, Barnor moved to England, where he spent the 1960s studying color photography at institutions like the London College of Printing and the Medway College of Art while freelancing for magazines such as Drum. Returning to Accra in 1969, he helped establish Sick Hagemeyer, Ghana’s first color-processing lab; opened a new studio, X23; taught children drumming and dance through his cultural troupe Fɛɛ Hii; and photographed for the U.S. Information Service and later for President J.J. Rawlings.
By the 1990s, however, economic crisis in Ghana made it difficult for him to earn a living as a photographer, and he eventually returned to England, taking a job as a cleaner at Heathrow Airport. For years, his negatives and prints remained in boxes, largely unseen, even as they contained a unique record of midcentury Ghanaian life and the Black diaspora between Accra and London.
Barnor’s rediscovery began slowly, with his first solo show in 2004 at the Acton Arts Festival and the publication of his first book in 2015, followed by exhibitions in Ghana and across Europe. Working closely with his Paris-based gallerist, Clémentine de la Féronnière, he has since built a digital archive of about 5,000 images, which he spends hours each day captioning so that future viewers will know who appears in the pictures, when they were taken and why.
The conversation shifts into an “Artist’s Questionnaire” format, where Barnor reflects on his daily routine of revisiting old photographs, answering questions and resting, insisting that properly captioning his negatives is the essential work he must finish “before I go.” He remembers his earliest shots with the Baby Brownie, including a church scene where a small girl is dwarfed by pews and a passing boy, and a municipal bus surrounded by trees that later disappeared under urban development — images that, to him, prove the importance of recording change.
Asked about his early sales, Barnor recounts photographing Nkrumah on the day of his release from prison in 1951, printing the pictures overnight and selling them in the market the next morning, then later licensing work to the Black Star agency in England. Looking back, he says he never thought much about money and jokes that, with more business sense, he might have become a millionaire, but instead he has treated money as something that arrives when needed rather than as an ambition.
He also describes his independence as a young photographer at the Daily Graphic, where even older colleagues worked under his guidance and later joined his studio after losing theirs. His “studios” included places like Makola Market, and he speaks with particular affection about photographing babies, insisting that his approach to capturing them can only be understood by watching him work, not by explanation alone.
Throughout the interview, Barnor emphasizes professionalism and presence — he recalls dressing neatly in a “suitable suit” when photographing presidents at Osu Castle and keeping a radio on in Ever Young so music from Ghana Broadcasting Corporation or Congo-Brazzaville floated through the studio. He praises the work of fellow artist Willis Bell, references his own hallway exhibitions in his retirement home where residents recognize historical figures, and describes ongoing relationships with younger artists like Ibrahim Mahama and photographer Dennis Temituro, whom he mentors and advises over WhatsApp, seeing mentorship and the sharing of experience as his lasting legacy.
