Barakat Contemporary is pleased to present Ever Young, the first solo exhibition in Asia to share the work of Ghanaian-British photographer James Barnor, from Thursday, March 17 to Sunday, May 8, 2022. 

Born in Accra in 1929, James Barnor has worked in a broad range of areas over a career spanning over six decades, including portrait photography and photojournalism. Using the photography genre to connect Africa with Britain, he has consistently created narratives that transcend culture. He is also Ghana’s first photojournalist, someone who recorded the fast-paced societal changes that occurred as Ghana gained independence in the late 1950s.“Ever Young” is the name of Barnor’s first studio, which he opened in Accra in 1953, and it also symbolizes the novelty and abundance that he envisioned amid the rapidly changing currents in Ghana at the time. It can further be seen as conveying the sense of truth within history that his work provides us with today—as well as a message of hope that we might adopt a new perspective on the present through it. As an African photographer working between Ghana and the UK, Barnor has spent a lifetime creating an artistic body of work boasting a uniquely warm touch and artistry. His images show us moments from history that reflect Ghana’s changing identity amid the societal transformations, technological innovations, and geopolitical developments of the 20th century’s latter half, including the achievement of Ghanaian independence and the diaspora culture of cosmopolitan London in the 1960s.  

The first floor of the exhibition shows early portrait work from the James Barnor Studio and Ever Young studio in the 1950s, along with images created after Barnor relocated to London in the 1960s. Due to the crude conditions and unstable electricity supplies in Ghana at the time, the Ever Young photographs made active use of natural lighting outside the studio. Representing a departure from the typical rigid studio atmosphere, the Ever Young studio was a setting when Barnor photographed people from different backgrounds and professions in warm and natural ways, from newlyweds and young women to nurses, yogis, officials, and actors. The photographs seen at the center of the gallery—including Drum Cover Girl Marie Hallowi, Rochester, Kent and Erlin Ibreck at Trafalgar Square—represent a new perspective on the “swinging” London of the 1960s, shot by the curious eye of an outsider working as a freelance photographer for the South African magazine DRUM in the cosmopolitan, multicultural city. Featuring Black models such as Erlin Ibreck and Marie Hallowi in a city where the fashion and culture were predominantly white, his photographs appeared on the cover of DRUM, presenting a new, dignified beauty through young and attractive African women. The diaspora portraits that Barnor took in the 1960s—including Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus—reflect not only their discerning style, but also the hope and tenacity of figures taking part in the early Black rights movement. Barnor’s photographs helped forge a new post-colonial African identity and aesthetic as they presented the Black communities that settled in London during the 1950s and 1960s, showing them from a subjective African perspective rather than the white European perspective that was the mainstream among photographers at the time. 

The second floor gallery features pastel-toned color photographs and portraits taken at Barnor’s second studio, called Studio X23, which he opened as he returned to Ghana in the 1970s and shared color photography technology there for the first time. After his rich experience in a foreign land, the photographer captured the people and landscapes of Ghana with a new, much more delicately refined touch. Awakening memories and nostalgia in the viewer, his images remind us that photography is a relic of the past, a mark left behind by things that have already happened. As they turn back the clock, Barnor’s photographs reconceptualize our reality today, introducing a new auteurist narrative. His work also shows unrevealed aspects of the truth within history, from colonial rule to the “swinging ’60s” in postwar Britain and the achievement of freedom through social revolution. All photographs exist as frozen moments, yet they can take on a different context of life as newly revealed fragments of the past come together with our own memories to create history. Through Barnor’s work from the 1950s to the 1980s, we can enjoy this meaningful experience.