At the upper part of the Volta River, Sanlé Sory rose to the pinnacle of Burkinabe photography in the 1960s.
Malians like Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe made names for themselves too in photography in Mali.
In Angola, Antoine Freitas was introduced to the photo business by missionaries.
He captured the searing revolution and uprising of Mbutu in Zaire (modern day DR Congo) and the much hyped Mohammed Ali fight in Kinshasa.
There was also Daniel Attoumou Amicchia who was introduced to photography by his brother.
He settled in Grand-Bassam in 1948.
He was born in Ghana in 1908 and died in 1994 at 86 from some malignant brain tumor.
There was also notable female photographers in the 1950s like: Patricia Coffie, Ruth of Ossai and Felicia Ewurasi.
Felicia Ewurasi
Born in 1935, Felicia Ewurasi became Ghana’s first female photographer at age 14!
Her father, J. E. Ansah groomed her in photography.
Her studio (Mrs. Felicia Annan’s Day and Night Quality Art Studio) was set up in 1953 at Jamestown.
She worked for Ghana’s first post-colonial president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s and Ghanaian Times Newspaper which was a Pro-CPP mouth piece.
She retired from photography in 2013.
The Two Most Celebrated Photographers in Pre-colonial and Post-colonial Ghana
Chris Tsue Hesse
He was born in 1932 and became an accomplished cinematographer and filmmaker in the 1950s.
Chris was famous for being the first war cameraman to shoot a film on the Congo crisis in 1960 for worldwide distribution.
From Pre-colonial to Post-colonial Ghana (1956 – 1966) he was the official photographer to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and subsequent presidents like: J. A. Ankrah, A. A. Afrifa, K. A. Busia, I. K. Acheampong, Fred Akuffo, Dr. Hilla Limann and J. J. Rawlings.
In 1985 he partially retired from active photography to become a full fledged member of the presbyterian church of Ghana.
He is (and has been married to her since 1956) married to Regina Hesse ( a retired banker of BOG).
They had 5 children together.
The now (as at 2022) 90 year old Chris used his rich photo skills to improve film making in Ghana and also to popularise the “mysticism” around Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
Frederick Seton James Barnor
Mr. Barnor was born on June 6, 1929, in Jamestown, Accra, then Gold Coast.
When he was 16, a beloved teacher, Mr. Acheampong, recommended he become editor of his primary school magazine.
The weekly written and edited magazine by Barnor and then hand-copied by another student, was pinned by the headmaster to the notice board, where it was read by the entire school.
When once, during exams, Barnor failed to produce an edition, he received lashes:
“It shows how important [the magazine] was,” Barnor said.
“And it was so important that it elevated my presence in the school to another level.”
His crafts teacher Emanuel M. Odonkor gave him his first camera, a Kodak Baby Brownie, around 1946.
Barnor, who did not attend secondary school, had originally intended to teach basket weaving and music, his two favourite past times.
Instead, in 1947, he became an apprentice for his cousin JP Dodoo, then a well-known Accra portrait photographer, from whom he learned the big-plate camera, as well as for another cousin, Julius Aikins, who worked in the darkroom for West African Photographic Services.
Aikins introduced Barnor to darkroom technique and photojournalism, and spurred a way of seeing and doing beyond the confines of the studio.
Carrying a smaller camera, Barnor went in search of images in the market and streets, and eventually, with an uncle’s equipment – which included a big-plate camera and a painted backdrop – set up his own outdoor studio.
(Indoor studios were as scarce then as light and electricity.)
“I started in 1950, and then in a small corner I had a darkroom and somewhere to sleep,” said Barnor.
The experience of shooting outdoors rendered him an expert of natural lighting, especially when it came to Black skin, which requires a strong understanding of the subtleties of skin tones and balancing of highlights and shadows.
That year, Barnor also became the Daily Graphic’s – and the country’s – first photojournalist.
He shot Ghana’s nascent independence, as well as his sister’s new dresses.
Recalled Barnor,
“When I worked for the Daily Graphic from the ’50s, and also freelance, I had to take photographs of girls and especially my sister.
My big sister was fashion this, and anytime she wore a dress, I took a picture and decided to sell some to the paper.
Even though I was doing that, I wasn’t quite a fashion photographer … I did have covers, you know, front page.”
He photographed Kwame Nkrumah’s release from prison and also shot for Black Star, the photo agency.
But it is not his picture of Nkrumah, who would go on to be Ghana’s first president, or of boxing champ Roy “the Black Flash” Ankrah that is his favourite but the one-time image of a baby catching his eye while spontaneously pushing up on all fours that Barnor captured, perfectly in focus, on his large-format camera.
(This motion was a first for the baby, who never repeated it.)
In 1953, Barnor set up his own photo studio in the fishing port of Jamestown.
He named it Ever Young after the Norse myth of Iduna he had read as a school exercise, as well for the photo retouching his customers demanded to take years off their appearance.
The studio became a sort of impromptu social centre where he also taught children photography.
Music, especially highlife – a combination of traditional Ghanaian rhythms, Trinidadian calypso, and jazz – was intrinsic to his work method and to setting the mood in the studio.
“I always had some music going almost every time … The feeling of readiness or pleasure or jubilation comes in when you go to a place where there’s music. Whatever you have [he touches his heart] that is upsetting, as soon as you go in and there is some music, you start to step in your mind.”
When asked about his process and whether he directed his photo subjects, Barnor replied,
“First I try to see what is coming from the subject. I try to see what the subject is wearing that needs to be pronounced or projected. Even if it’s a walking stick, if it’s a shoe … Ladies want to show everything. Men don’t bother too much … Honestly, if I saw anything – a new fabric or a new dress, a new design – I tried to let the person pose so I could capture that. If her hair is styled, the emphasis is on the style. I start with the model. Then work out what I can get to bring out the best.”
It was through Ever Young that Barnor met Jim Bailey, a co-founder of Drum, the influential anti-apartheid and Black culture magazine that built the careers of several early, noted Black photojournalists.
“We fell for one another,” said Barnor.
Bailey also hired the photographer to shoot for Drum.
Together they would organise Drum parties in the studio and on the nearby beach.
Barnor, on a last-minute walk urged by Bailey, captured an impromptu shot of Nkrumah on Ghana’s first night of independence in 1957.
With Ghana’s birth, an entourage of world press descended on the capital, and Barnor became bedazzled by their equipment (including its relatively small size).
He decided to go to London, in 1959, “to learn how it’s done by professionals,” prompted, too, by the encouragement of Acheampong, who preceded him and wrote, “London is the place for you.”
In London, Barnor developed a friendship with Dennis Kemp, of Kodak Lecture Service, who helped pave his way.
“He was a different person altogether,” remembered Barnor.
“And he made my staying and living in England possible. Or different from any other Black people … We fell in love straightaway.” (When Barnor recalls the people he met and worked with during his lifetime, he radiates, and the word “love” often arises.)
It was also with Kemp, on a visit together to a photo exhibit at Royal Albert Hall, that Barnor was introduced to colour film – which was nonexistent at the time in Africa.
“Can I learn this?”
Barnor eagerly inquired of a random man tending the show – and who happened to be the head of Colour Processing Laboratories (CPL), in Kent, a leading colour printer in the UK.
Barnor was hired.
But Kemp also pressed him to apply to Medway College of Art, where Barnor was accepted.
“Dennis said, ‘You must go to school’,” recalled Barnor.”
‘You must compare your work to others’ …
I had 10 years in Ghana as a photographer.
Why should I go to school?
But I kept quiet. I went to school.”
At Medway, he formalised his training in portraiture, fashion, and technique.
After completing his studies, in 1963, Barnor was hired by the college as a technical assistant while also continuing as a printer with CPL.
It was a difficult time to be Black in Britain.
Those encouraged to emigrate from the crown’s colonies were ultimately wanted for their sweat and labour only.
The Commonwealth Act and other conservative laws limiting immigrants’ rights were being legislated.
Said Barnor of that time and of Kemp:
“That man changed what otherwise could have been disastrous for me.
During the ’60s, Black man, where to live, where to … Oh, it was terrible … Nobody would employ you to be a photographer.
What would you do?
Would you be in the studio convincing a sitter to smile – or touching a lady’s dress?
No. If anything, you’d be in the darkroom …
There were too many photographers around to look for a Ghanaian, Black photographer.”
Barnor began landing local assignments for Drum as well as the Trinidad-based magazine Flamingo, including several covers.
In an interview with Afua Hirsch in Frieze (May 19, 2021), Barnor noted,
“I remember travelling from Kent to London one time and seeing Drum, with my picture on the cover, on the stalls. I said to myself:
‘Yes, at least I’ve done it.’ You know, in America, Black photographers were taking pictures of Black people for magazines.
But, in England, it wasn’t like that.
There were no Black photographers at all.”
It was a transitional and turbulent time, but Barnor’s Black subjects in contrast show a oneness with the space and place.
They do not merely pose – they inhabit the frame, their feet firmly planted.
In a black-and-white photo of Mike Eghan, a pioneering Ghanaian journalist then with the BBC World Service, he extends his arms as if taking flight in London’s Piccadilly Circus, an international crossroads accentuated with Coca-Cola, Dr Zhivago, airlines, and Chinese-restaurant signs (1967).
(Or perhaps Eghan was simply embracing it all – before a policeman, Barnor said, abruptly tapped the photographer to announce, “We don’t do that here.”)
Several of his 1960s images were cinematic.
Despite his Drum covers and being in demand as a colour printer, Barnor made the decision to return to Accra in 1969 to manage Agfa’s new colour lab, intent on promoting what was for Africa a new medium and its possibilities.
Said the photographer during his Zoom talk at MASI Lugano, on March 15, 2022,
“I’m sure there were one or two people doubting whether a Black man could do it.”
His prints from the time are suffused with saturated hues – also an effort on Barnor’s part to demonstrate the expressiveness of colour technology.
Barnor’s young daughters Mavis and Mary posed with an Agfa beachball in an image that captures the jewel tones of their swimsuits and the rich colours of their skin.
Throughout his work, Barnor’s women stand on equal footing with European women, but also with the photographer himself.
They are never objectified.
Many are symbols of strength (often shot from a low angle): from Accra’s first female policewoman (1954) to a defiant woman posing in a pink mini and shimmering silver boots (1967) to a young girl in kente cloth with an Oduku hairstyle and markings at a puberty rite celebration (1970s) to three Ghanaian lawyers gathered in their mini dresses after a military trial for an attempted coup d’état (1973).
The photographer’s female subjects of the ’60s and ’70s exude a signature breeziness and a letting down of their guard before his camera.
Yet Barnor leaves them anything but vulnerable.
They fill the frame with presence and expansive colour, from their dresses and African cloth to their radiant skin.
As Barnor explained to Emma Firth (CNN, June 19, 2020), “My learning, and everything, is around how the Black body appears in colour.”
George and Albert Lutterodt founded the country’s first photo studio in Jamestown, in 1876, and gave rise to a family dynasty of studios that existed in Accra until 1945.
There were other noted Ghanaian photographers, too.
Neils Walwin Holm set up an atelier in Accra in 1883 (and then went on to Lagos and London).
His son JAC Holm opened his studio in Accra in 1919.
Felicia Abban, Ghana’s first female professional photographer, opened hers in 1955 as earlier stated in 170 Years of Photography in Africa
Barnor left Agfa after three years.
He opened a second studio, X23, in 1973, shooting several record album covers.
He photographed for the US embassy and its magazine Amannee (Amanne3 in Twi, meaning “message”) from 1977 to 1982.
He also managed a children’s musical group, Fee Hi, and went on tour with them to Italy in 1983.
But, noted the Guardian (“Party Time!,” November 19, 2019):
“Barnor spent the next 24 years in Ghana, struggling to make a living before returning to England to find that much had changed.
‘I was a cleaner in schools and at Heathrow airport,’ he says. ‘I was 60 and nearing pensionable age, and already photography was not the same as it had been:
Everybody could use a small camera.
Even the colour processing lab said the Japanese invasion had spoiled their work.’”
“When I was living [in London], it was a time of my film and prosperity. I shouldn’t have left,” Barnor explained to me.
He was working full-time at CPL, shooting for Drum and doing private jobs for Ghanaians in the diaspora community, he said.
“I shouldn’t have gone back to Ghana at all, but the love of giving back, which took me to do the colour, made me go back.”
In 2009, Barnor’s work came to attention in an exhibition in West London, where it was seen by Autograph, the London-based visual arts organisation and space, which held Barnor’s solo show in 2010 and acquired 100 images.
Together with Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, in Paris, it published the weighty monograph Ever Young in 2015.
The Tate included several pictures in their collection.
Barnor currently lives in a council flat for seniors in West London.
In 2021, Clémentine de la Féronnière, his French publisher, who has undertaken the arduous task of digitising and categorising the majority of his negatives, estimated their number to be at 100,000.
That so many survived is miraculous considering both shifting climates and Barnor’s life circumstances.
Negatives – stored in Tupperware, plastic bags, suitcases, including glass plates, 120mm, 35mm, black-and-white and colour – filled Barnor’s home.
Of all my questions, the one of how many negatives he had amassed clearly vexed him.
“That I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know that for a long time. When we talk about images, I worked as a studio photographer for 10 years. When I sat there using a plate camera, a field camera with plate negatives … Those negatives, 10 years’ work, have been thrown away because I stayed in [London in] the ’60s … And my negatives were in somebody’s way, so he threw them away … With what we are working with now, can you imagine? And they’d been thrown away because they were too heavy. They were large, they were taking space.”
Barnor admitted he was so excited about photographing Nkrumah on Independence night, that he did not think twice about handing over his negatives to Bailey to forward to Drum’s Johannesburg office.
He never saw those again.
The US embassy retained the negatives the photographer had shot for them.
“So I don’t want to think of how many negatives I have, you know – it would make me think of how many I would have had,” Barnor said.
Barnor mastered what some might claim as colonial technology to picture a reality for Africans and people of African descent.
He stepped beyond the work of celebrated African photographers like Seydou Keita and Malik Sidibé in his having shot internationally, and in his facility to slide freely from portraiture to photojournalism to fashion and even landscape, and from black-and-white to colour, from Black subjects to white.
In 2019, he established the James Barnor Foundation.
(It will award its first prize, in 2022, to a West African photographer.)
He shot Vogue Italia’s March 2022 cover, the first Black photographer to do so.
Among those whom Barnor photographed were Ghana’s future first president Kwame Nkrumah (pictured kicking a football in one of Barnor’s shots), 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.
South Africa Photography
Photography arrived in South Africa with the British and Dutch colonists in the 19th Century.
From the 15th century onwards, most of the countries in Africa have been colonised by the European world powers, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Spain, Italy and Belgium.
South Africa was officially colonised in 1652.
Following the defeat of the Boers in the Anglo–Boer or South African War (1899–1902), the Union of South Africa was created as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire on 31 May 1910 in terms of the South Africa Act 1909, which amalgamated the four previously separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Colony of Natal, Transvaal Colony, and Orange River Colony.
The country became a fully sovereign nation state within the British Empire, in 1934 following enactment of the Status of the Union Act.
The monarchy came to an end on 31 May 1961, replaced by a republic as the consequence of a 1960 referendum, which legitimised the country becoming the Republic of South Africa.
From 1948–1994, South African politics was dominated by Afrikaner nationalism.
Racial segregation and white minority rule known officially as apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness”, was implemented in 1948.
The beginning of apartheid in 1948 saw the emergence of a generation of photographers whose work would come to define South African photography for the next four decades.
Many of the most well-known South African photographers, such as Ernest Cole, Bob Gosani Peter Magubane, and Jürgen Schadeberg, worked for Drum magazine in the 1950s, where their images conveyed the experiences of Black people living in cities in the first years of apartheid.
Photographers chronicled the Defiance Campaign, the violence of the police, and the growing resistance movements.
At the same time, they took portraits and images of everyday life that provide insight into what it was like to live under apartheid.
These kinds of images have increasingly been of interest to researchers and curators who have come to recognize the importance of vernacular photography, street photography, and the work of studio portrait photographers.
The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 marked a turning point in the country’s history and was followed by intensified repression and violence, the banning of opposition political parties, the jailing of political leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe, and mass forced removals as neighborhoods were declared “whites only” areas.
The Soweto uprisings in June 1976 and the protests that followed across South Africa signaled the beginning of a time of increased violence as the apartheid state sought to crush the resistance movements and thousands of protestors were detained without trial, interrogated, and tortured and several political activists were murdered by the security police.
By the 1980s, photography had a clear place in the struggle for freedom in the country and many photographers perceived the camera as a weapon to be used against the state.
In 1982, the Afrapix collective was formed by a group of photographers committed to opposing apartheid who went on to produce the most significant visual record of this time.
The years immediately before the end of apartheid saw an increase in political violence and between 1990 and 1994 more than 10,000 people were killed. Photographers who documented this time drew the world’s attention to the bitter struggle in the country.
They went on to photograph the jubilation when Mandela was finally released from prison and the first free and fair elections when South Africans of all races were able to vote.
Some of the most brilliant photographers of the last century documented the apartheid years, and their work plays a key role in how this time period is remembered and understood.
