Skip to main content
Read page text
page 62
62 James barnor Accra / London 5 November – 31 May Serpentine Gallery James Barnor’s retrospective at the Serpentine starts with a 1952 shot of the photographer leaning intently in the doorway of his portrait studio Ever Young, down by the harbour in Accra. It’s a new venture – aged 23, he has only just finished a photographic apprenticeship with his cousin JPD Dodoo – but already the pinboard is full of shots of former clients, drawn perhaps by his promise to render them ‘ever young’ through skilful retouching. So begins an expansive and prodigious career documented in discrete chapters through this carefully-curated show. In the studio portraits that follow, a boxer angles for a right hook, a pastor fixes the camera squarely with his gaze, a policewoman salutes a distant horizon in neat white socks. The people of Accra arrange themselves for the camera, poised against the painted flowers and balcony of Barnor’s trompe l’oeil backdrop. Seventy years on in a London gallery, it feels intimate, if not intrusive, to witness these moments of collaboration between the sitter and photographer, like eavesdropping on the conversations that preceded the click of the shutter. The format is familiar – during the mid-1990s, Portrait of James Barnor in front of some of his photographs, Accra (c. 1952) Kwame Nkrumah, wears his prison graduate cap as he kicks a football before the start of an international match, Accra (1952) when curators and dealers began reprinting and circulating the archive of Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) and other West African photographers through museums and commercial art spaces, large-format studio portraits rapidly became the internationally recognisable face of African photography. This sudden burst of interest coincided with growing demands for institutions to platform local modes of self-representation as a counter to the historic violence inflicted by European photographic practices in Africa. It also may have reflected, as Mark Sealy recently suggests, the fact that in contrast to the harsh realities depicted in South African documentary photography, the genre’s easy charm offered Western markets ‘a more palatable perspective on the impact of Europeans in Africa’. Before long though, Barnor had embarked on a different mode of practice. Invited to contribute to the new Daily Graphic newspaper, he started taking his small, hand-held camera onto the streets to document the political and social life of Accra. It was a time of intense change – four years before Ever Young opened, the city had seen riots sparked by the police suppression of a peaceful rally by returning WWII veterans. The unrest was the straw that broke the back of European colonialism, not only in the Gold Coast, but across Africa. By 1952, the Pan-Africanist campaigner Kwame Nkrumah had been released from prison to serve as Prime Minister – a playful shot shows him kicking off a football match in his prison cap the same year. In 1957, he would lead the country to independence as the Republic of Ghana, the first in a series of nations across Africa to relinquish European rule. As the country’s first photojournalist, now also working for the prominent South Africa-based Drum magazine, Barnor was well placed to capture the transition. The works in this second chapter of the show docu-
page 63
exhibitions 63 Model Erlin Ibreck pictured in London for Drum magazine (1966) Shop assistant Sick Hagemeyer in Accra (circa 1971) ment liberation rallies, riot police and euphoric street celebrations, as well as the awkward formalities of the independence ceremonies – the Duchess of Kent on a podium, fanning away the heat, and the tactfully-named ‘Farewell Durbar’ for the colonial Governor General, Arden-Clarke. Two years later, drawn by his mentor’s promise that ‘London is the place for you’, Barnor moved to the UK, and the shots of exuberant parties on Chokhor beach suddenly give way to Victorian terraces, grey skies and market workers shifting produce in Covent Garden. The images affectionately portray an ever-growing circle of family and friends, belying the social and professional hostility that Barnor faced at the time. ‘You couldn’t get work in the 1960s as a Black photographer’ he reflects ‘if you worked for a studio in London, you worked behind the scenes in the darkroom doing odd jobs’. However, ongoing assignments for Drum magazine provided an outlet, and Barnor began scouting for models from the African diaspora, meeting Ugandan student and long-term collaborator Erlin Ibreck at a bus stop by Victoria Station. Effortlessly glamorous in eyeliner and psychedelic prints, Barnor’s Drum cover girls pose with pillar boxes, Jaguar cars, tube signs and Trafalgar Square pigeons, deploying the archetypal iconography of ‘Swinging Sixties’ London. At the same time however, the images offer a clear rejoinder to the prevailing whiteness of the British fashion scene. ‘Working with James felt exhilarating’, recalls Ibreck in the exhibition catalogue, ‘because it gave me the feeling that we were conspiring together to shatter accepted images of beauty, and to replace them with new and just as valid representations’. Barnor spent the 1960s studying photography, undertaking a three-year course at Medway College, and working at the UK’s leading colour laboratories in Edenbridge, Kent. Returning to Ghana in 1970, he used these skills to set up the country’s first colour processing laboratory, for Agfa-Gevaert. The final chapter of the exhibition charts the subsequent decade in full colour, through a series of vibrant test shots from the lab, portraits from his second Accra studio, X23, and commissions for record covers and advertisements. Distilled from an archive of 32,000 images, the exhibition deftly maps Barnor’s effortless transitions between spaces and genres over the course of three decades, but the show itself represents the latest chapter in this extraordinary life, cementing his hallowed place in the London art world. Following exhibitions at the Black Cultural Archives (2007), Autograph (2010) and the October Gallery (2016), demand for Barnor’s work has spiralled on the gallery circuit; this year, the Serpentine retrospective runs concurrently with another solo show at the Bristol Photo Festival. It’s well justified recognition. None of these archival images were ever intended for exhibition, but his keen eye and sharp technique translate smoothly into this format and space. Neither are they explicitly political in their aims, but in documenting friendship and creative collaboration in a shifting world, they nevertheless do something quite radical. — Polly Savage

Page Text

View plaintext

62

James barnor Accra / London

5 November – 31 May Serpentine Gallery

James Barnor’s retrospective at the Serpentine starts with a 1952 shot of the photographer leaning intently in the doorway of his portrait studio Ever Young, down by the harbour in Accra. It’s a new venture – aged 23, he has only just finished a photographic apprenticeship with his cousin JPD Dodoo – but already the pinboard is full of shots of former clients, drawn perhaps by his promise to render them ‘ever young’ through skilful retouching. So begins an expansive and prodigious career documented in discrete chapters through this carefully-curated show. In the studio portraits that follow, a boxer angles for a right hook, a pastor fixes the camera squarely with his gaze, a policewoman salutes a distant horizon in neat white socks. The people of Accra arrange themselves for the camera, poised against the painted flowers and balcony of Barnor’s trompe l’oeil backdrop. Seventy years on in a London gallery, it feels intimate, if not intrusive, to witness these moments of collaboration between the sitter and photographer, like eavesdropping on the conversations that preceded the click of the shutter.

The format is familiar – during the mid-1990s,

Portrait of James Barnor in front of some of his photographs, Accra (c. 1952)

Kwame Nkrumah, wears his prison graduate cap as he kicks a football before the start of an international match, Accra (1952)

when curators and dealers began reprinting and circulating the archive of Seydou Keïta (1921-2001) and other West African photographers through museums and commercial art spaces, large-format studio portraits rapidly became the internationally recognisable face of African photography. This sudden burst of interest coincided with growing demands for institutions to platform local modes of self-representation as a counter to the historic violence inflicted by European photographic practices in Africa. It also may have reflected, as Mark Sealy recently suggests, the fact that in contrast to the harsh realities depicted in South African documentary photography, the genre’s easy charm offered Western markets ‘a more palatable perspective on the impact of Europeans in Africa’. Before long though, Barnor had embarked on a different mode of practice. Invited to contribute to the new Daily Graphic newspaper, he started taking his small, hand-held camera onto the streets to document the political and social life of Accra. It was a time of intense change – four years before Ever Young opened, the city had seen riots sparked by the police suppression of a peaceful rally by returning WWII veterans. The unrest was the straw that broke the back of European colonialism, not only in the Gold Coast, but across Africa. By 1952, the Pan-Africanist campaigner Kwame Nkrumah had been released from prison to serve as Prime Minister – a playful shot shows him kicking off a football match in his prison cap the same year. In 1957, he would lead the country to independence as the Republic of Ghana, the first in a series of nations across Africa to relinquish European rule. As the country’s first photojournalist, now also working for the prominent South Africa-based Drum magazine, Barnor was well placed to capture the transition. The works in this second chapter of the show docu-

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content