Some of us are born to be bridges—connections between what came before us and the futures we are destined to create. James Barnor is one of the most important bridges of our time. He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era. In the almost 92 years Barnor has spent on this planet—living mostly between Ghana and the UK—he has captured aspects of African and Black life that are meaningful to the people who live it, and often may not have been recorded otherwise: everyday moments such as merchant women selling wares in the market, people getting on and off the bus, teenagers hanging out together, early images of Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s first President), and even the introduction of color photo processing to his region of the African continent.
