12:45 GMT 6th January 2011
‘The crowds were uncontrollable,’ recalls Barnor sporting a kente scarf bearing Nkrumah’s name. ‘He was the number one topic of conversation and everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of him. i put the camera above my head and hoped for the best.’
It was a good picture and Barnor decided to make copies to sell, enlarging one and hanging it round his neck as an advertisement. ‘Everyone wanted a copy, particularly the Mak ola [Accra central’s market] market wo men – they were among his staunchest followers.’
Nkrumah had been jailed for leading a nationwide civil disobedience campaign in the push for independence, but went on to win a landslide election victory from behind bars. Now he was being asked to form a government, a sign that the British were finally relinquishing their hold on the Gold Coast.
Barnor ran a makeshift studio just around the corner from the West end Arena where Nkrumah was due to greet his rapturous supporters but remembers not wanting to attend at first. ‘I’d had a busy day and felt tired. Believe it or not, I had to be persuaded to go,’ he laughs.
After that Barnor made a point of following Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) with his camera, recording the heady days of Ghana’s transition from colony to independent nation.
‘The CPP were always holding rallies at the Arena and my premises were so close I could hear what was going on from inside. It was a great vantage point.’
Among those who used his photographs was the Daily Graphic, which had been set up in Accra in 1950 by British newspaper baron Cecil King.
‘I was like the original paparazzi, not always welcome because I worked for what was considered a white man’s paper,’ says Barnor. But gradually the CPP got to know him and one day invited him to cover a parley between Ga chiefs and Nkrumah, who was busy widening his support base.
‘When I asked how much I was going to be paid they laughed saying I should count myself lucky to be offered such an assignment.’
Barnor soon found himself following Nkrumah around with his camera, taking pictures of him in all manner of settings, even shopping in Accra’s Kingsway stores. he also recalls the day he snapped Nkrumah meeting band leader Okoe “Kolomashie”, who had popularised a form of Ga processional protest music. ‘The band made a great show of their support for the CPP, wearing party colours of red, green and white and making up songs about Nkrumah. A lot of people turned to Nkrumah after that.’
A recent exhibition of Barnor’s work in London showed Ghana’s future president in other photo opportunities amid more conventional shots of him on official occasions. in one he is kicking a football to start off a match at the former Owusu Memorial Park in Accra, in another he is seen with boxer roy “Black flash” Ankrah, who was the British empire featherweight champion at the time. Barnor even got a shot of himself seated next to the ‘old man’. ‘I went to his home in Accra New Town and put the camera on a tripod and self-timer. It was a great moment.’
It’s a photograph he treasures. ‘Nkrumah was so charismatic. You might think one thing, but he would speak and turn your head around in an instant.’
The exhibition’s title, Ever Young, refers to the name of the studio that Barnor went on to open in 1953 near the Lighthouse in Jamestown, one of Accra’s oldest districts.
‘I called it Ever Young because I used to touch up photographs to erase lines and blemishes on people’s faces – just like Photoshop only manually,’ smiles Barnor, now a lively 81-year-old.
He went into business after serving a photographic apprenticeship with his cousin, JP Dodoo, himself a well-known portrait photographer, using an old-fashioned glass plate camera.
A trail of people would turn up to Ever Young, from smiling newly weds and earnest looking children kitted out for a fancy dress party, to a saluting policewoman. That particular photograph is titled Policewoman No 10 as she was the tenth female recruit of Ghana’s new police service.
‘In those days it didn’t cost much to have your photo taken so I had no shortage of customers. In the beginning I took most of the shots outside because Ghana has plenty of daylight, which was free, unlike electricity. When I became more established I opened what we called a night and day studio, which was a novelty then.’
But the restless Barnor liked to be on the move and would also be out on the streets with a Kodak box camera. Apart from the Daily Graphic, his services were also enlisted by the South African-based Drum, the most widely read magazine in Africa at the time. Describing itself as a news and lifestyle magazine, Drum specialised in investigative features and Barnor particularly remembers supplying surreptitious shots for an article about the execution of a prisoner, managing to trail the body as it was taken away for burial: ‘The point was, I was a real Jamestown man, I knew everything that was going on.’
After covering Ghana’s momentous independence celebrations in 1957, Barnor had thoughts about spreading his wings. Helped by a grant from the Cocoa Marketing Board, he travelled to England in 1959 to work at Edenbridge Colour Processing Laboratories in Kent before joining the prestigious Medway College of Art in nearby Rochester.
Afterwards, he found work with Drum, whose London offices were in Fleet Street. He took to specialising in fashion shoots that showed glamorous looking black people in typical London settings, from Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus to the red telephone box and the Tube, as if to suggest that black people, too, could be part of the Swinging Sixties.
Such images were in stark contrast to the usual depiction of African and Caribbean migrants, weighed down by the hardship of living in an unwelcoming Britain. But it was typically Barnor – most of his output has a carefree, optimistic air about it. ‘I live happygo- lucky,’ he says. ‘I call myself Lucky Jim.’
One photograph, which went on to grace the cover of a 1967 edition of Drum, shows an attractive young woman with a mischievous smile posed in front of a pillar box. ‘The model came along wearing a red scarf and I felt it would blend in well with the post box, the sort of well known London landmark I liked to use,’ he recalls.
‘It was freezing weather and she had to wear leather gloves but she was very cheerful and we got on very well. In fact from her looks I thought she was from Accra but it turned out she was from Jamaica.’
The image is one of several from his London days included in the exhibition, which was also on show earlier in the year at Harvard University’s Rudenstine Gallery in the US. Hailed for the way in which it colourfully chronicles two very different societies in transition – Ghana and Britain – it spans the late 1940s to the late ‘60s to show a distinct shift in style but not necessarily approach.
Barnor spent 10 years in London and remembers it fondly, acknowledging that he was in a privileged position. ‘I moved in enlightened circles so I did not have to put up with most of what other black people had to go through, though I did notice that when I sat on a bus, many people didn’t want to sit next to me,’ he smiles.
He returned to Accra to set up the first colour processing laboratory in Ghana and establish X23, a new studio in central Accra. During the next 24 years, he also worked for the American Embassy and for former president Jerry Rawlings at Osu Castle.
Now back living in London, the father of eight is clearly energised by the show. ‘I wish it had happened 40 years ago,’ he declares. ‘I have been a photographer for all this time and this is my first major gallery exhibition. All the same, I am a happy man.’
Ever Young was presented in association with Autograph ADP at the Rivington Place Gallery, London EC2.
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