Photographer · Ghana
James Barnor
James Barnor (born 1929) is a Ghanaian photographer whose career spans Ghana's independence and swinging London. He ran the Ever Young studio in Accra in the 1950s, photographed the arrival of independence, shot fashion and cover pictures for Drum magazine in London in the 1960s, and returned home in 1969 to help set up colour processing in Ghana. A major retrospective at the Serpentine in London in 2021 brought his work to a wide new audience.
Updated 2 min read
James Barnor was born in Accra in 1929 and, after an apprenticeship with a relative, opened his studio, Ever Young, in the Jamestown neighbourhood of Accra in the early 1950s. He made portraits of the city's people and, as a press photographer for the Daily Graphic, covered the political events that led to Ghana becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to win independence from colonial rule, in 1957.
In 1959 he moved to London, where he studied photography at Medway College of Art in Kent, worked at Colour Processing Laboratories, England's largest colour photo lab, and was commissioned by Drum, the influential South African magazine, photographing fashion and portraits of Black Londoners, models and visiting celebrities, many of them for its covers. His pictures are among the liveliest records of the African diaspora in 1960s Britain.
In 1969 he returned to Ghana as a representative of the Belgian firm Agfa-Gevaert, and helped found the country's first colour photo laboratory; he continued to work for decades. James Barnor: Accra/London – A Retrospective, the 2021 show at the Serpentine North Gallery, was his largest to date and concentrated on the years 1950 to 1980; sources give slightly different opening dates, but it ran into October.
How to look at Barnor: watch the two cities talk to each other. The studio portraits of Accra and the London street and studio pictures share a warmth and a sense of people choosing how to be seen, and the early prints are silver gelatin black and white, so the arrival of colour in his later work is itself part of the story. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The Serpentine's pages, Contact Photo's Ever Young exhibition page, LUMA Arles and the CIRCA gallery page document his archive and shows, and Bard's museum database lists him. Check each for current displays. Half a century after his Drum covers, Misan Harriman became the first Black man to photograph a cover of British Vogue. See our lists of Ghanaian photographers and African photographers.
