James Barnor: Accra/London: A Retrospective

Interesting exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery of photographs by James Barnor.

Barnor is a Ghanian photographer who was worked between Accra and London. He did studio, portrait and documentary work and his archive has recently been digitised. The pictures were shown in a continuous line around the gallery in chronological order. The whole show gave a lovely sense of not only his work but also his family and friends.

The show was roughly in three sections. The early works came from his Ever Young Studio in Accra which became a social centre for the town. There were charming portraits, some shown here, of local people and it was fun to spot the reuse of backgrounds and props. You had a sense of looking at the population of a town in the 1950s.

In the 1960s Barnor went to London and the pictures there capture the mood of the time as well as recording the experience of an immigrant population in the city. I loved the pictures of Old Covent Garden and one of his son being admired by three old ladies. There was also a selection of covers and fashion photography he did for Drum magazine, a South African family magazine for black readers founded under apartheid in 1951.

The final section looked at Barnor’s return to Ghana and how he introduced colour photography to the area founding Studio X23.

Closes 22 October 2021

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