James Barnor, the 93-year-old Ghanaian master photographer, has shot against the shifting tectonic plates of Africa’s colonial liberation and Britain’s Swinging Sixties and Windrush generation: political, sports and media personalities; fashion and album covers; the African diaspora community; and everyday people. His intimate images have formalism in their framing and sumptuousness in their engravings, but above all there is love.
“I never saw myself separated from my clients, my subjects,” Barnor explained candidly in a video interview from his London home. “I want to be a part of them, and I want them to be a part of me.” His carefully composed mise en scène (the artist previews images of him) has as much to do with Barnor’s collusion with his models as with the characters themselves.
From July 4 to September 22, LUMA Arles, the center for the arts, will highlight James Barnor: Stories. Pictures from the Archive (1947-87), including never-before-seen images and a book of the same title, at the international photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. The show coincides with the exhibition of the artist’s work at London’s Serpentine Gallery, James Barnor: Accra/London – a Retrospective, now at the Museo d’arte della Svizzera Italiana (MASI Lugano), in Italy, and will then travel to the Detroit Institute of the Arts (opening May 2023).
It’s been a long road for Barnor, whose life, in his storytelling—he’s a lively, heartfelt storyteller—is like a feature film, and whose due recognition didn’t come until he was almost 80 years old.
