The Serpentine re-opens in May with ‘James Barnor: London/Accra’, a major survey of the Ghanaian photographer’s work. In anticipation, the London gallery has taken over the screens at Piccadilly Circus throughout April to highlight the themes and influence of his masterful archive. In collaboration with digital art platform CIRCA, each night a two and a half-minute visual feast dives into the ‘Past, Present & Future’ his oeuvre.

First on show were Barnor’s famed images of 1960s London edited by Vogue Italia’s Ferdinando Verderi. Then Olu Odukoya from Modern Matters explored Barnor’s focus on women, Modernism, the passage of time and use of colour. And now, Awa Konaté, founder of Culture Art Society (CAS) and assistant curator of the Serpentine retrospective, presents five contemporary Black photographers whose practice is deeply influenced by Barnor - Silvia Rosi, Thabiso Sekgala, Adama Jalloh, David Nana Opoku Ansah and Lebohang Kganye.

Barnor was born in Accra in 1929 and opened his Ever Young studio in 1953. He relocated to London in 1959 where he studied and shot editorials Drum magazine before returning to Ghana in the 1970s to establish the country’s first colour processing lab. With a vast body of work covering studio portraiture, photo journalism, fashion and lifestyle, his lens has documented his own country’s journey through independence and its influential music scene, as well as the experiences of the UK’s first generations of African diaspora, and so much more besides. It wasn’t until more recently however that his contribution to the art world has been fully recognised. In 2019 he was honoured with the inaugural show at the Nubuke Foundation in Accra and now the Serpentine exhibition, chief curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, celebrates his most defining images from 1950 to 1980. From shop assistants to cover girls, from Muhammed Ali and Kwame Nkrumah to pearly kings and hospital nurses, Barnor’s natural affinity for his subjects is what makes these artworks so precious.

For Nataal, Awa Konaté, writes about her approach to the Piccadilly Circus takeover:

When we were making our selection of artists it was imperative to centre James Barnor both as an individual artist and within a long-standing Black radical tradition, whereby the camera lens produces a visual language for the possibilities of Black communities to remember against the imposition of an external gaze.

As an interdisciplinary research platform engaged with developing curatorial methodologies through the use of archives to re-inform engagements to contemporary art practices, it was important that our framework reflected the intricate dynamics between past, present, and future.

Barnor’s works are important because they are richly layered and intimate visual readings into the lives of Black people at a time of significant transition and radical socio-political development - here in Britain and elsewhere.

The futurity of his archive, or what we call ‘photographic porosity’ that is timeless crossings of Black intimacies, continental and diasporic, are continuously rearticulated in the encounters of his archive. Barnor’s work gathers people and photographs, transcending conventional ideas of time and space, whilst the tender negotiations between his eye and those portrayed are held within the documentation of subtle relations.

We wanted to convey a reading of his corpus, one that registers agency and the poetics of love, and is situated in dialogue with these contemporary artists forming part of a wider visual history of photography going beyond the often-assumed simplicity of Black portraiture.

Silvia Rosi creates portraits with strong visual references to classic West African studio portraiture in the restaging of her Togolese heritage and personal Afro-Italian migration histories. Silvia’s works evoke the spirit of Barnor’s ‘Ever Young Studio’ days, where the studio setting is a space through which one can be reinvented and re-interpreted.

Thabiso Sekgala’s tender photographs of the “born-free” generation of South Africans reflects deeply on the futility of home and belonging. These quiet yet powerful observances are familiar with the works Barnor took upon returning to Ghana after a decade in Europe. The brooding tensions of (re)navigating space, time, and place underlined by the mediation of seeing, are shared between Sekgala and Barnor.

Adama Jalloh is known for her black and white portraits documenting the culturally rich landscape of London. In Jalloh’s oeuvre, we recognise the shared sensibility of capturing intimacy in a way that yields a captivating and tender view into societies and cultures in transition. This is true of Barnor’s social documentary portraits taken across the UK in the 1960s as important documentations of Black lives of which they were rendered invisible.

David Nana Opoku Ansah is a young Accra-based photographer and filmmaker whose works exist at the nexus between fashion photography and studio portraiture. They explore community, freedom, and the ongoing socio-political temporalities in Ghana. Ansah, who cites Barnor as an influence, represents the generation of emerging continental Ghanaians whose self-visualisation is greatly informed by Barnor, yet breaks to extend ongoing dialogues between their now and what is also their past as found in Barnor’s archive.

Lebohang Kganye’s photographs create pictorial narratives as a mode of remembrance and honouring through the revisiting and restaging of herself in her mother’s archive. This embodies the current coming together of Barnor’s works in preparation for the survey at Serpentine. The coming together and revisiting required to both unearth new stories and name those previously unnamed.

They have all been selected to reflect a particular strand of Barnor’s trajectory, but also as an extension of how the archive - true to itself - exists unbound to any essence of time or place.

Here, three of the participating artists have their say.

David Nana Opoku

"James Barnor's work reminds me of a utopia and a community I will never be a part of. I can only relive these moments through his images. The sense of community is what I dream about a lot. I think of him as a great teacher and a force. Anytime I get stuck or have questions on my mind, I ask myself what he would've done. This has helped in my growth as an image maker. Because of him, I learnt to be inquisitive and always make sure I have control of my narrative. He plays a very big role in my work and stories I want to explore."

Silvia Rosi

"James Barnor has always been a great influence for his ability as an artist to be present and to record history. As an Italian photographer of Togolaise descent I find myself researching my own identity between two continents. In the context of this research, Barnor’s work, as well as my family album’s photos, act as a compass, for the way in which they guide me through a documentation of the black experience at times of strong historical transition.”

Lebohang Kganye

“Working on Ke Lefa Laka:Her-story a few years ago, while looking at photographers that worked with Drum magazine, I was intrigued by the sense of playfulness and a suggested performance of ideal-selves in James Barnor's portraits of black fashionable women.”

James Barnor: Past, Present & Future runs throughout April 2021 at Piccadilly Circus, London

James Barnor: London/Accra: A Retrospective is on view at the Serpentine, London, from 19 May to 22 October 2021

Read our 2019 interview with James Barnor here.

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Visit Culture Art Society
Visit CIRCA

Published on 21/04/2021