James Barnor: "The main idea was to make the face look younger"
Interview by Antonella Pisilli, London, 28 August 2016
Recorded in London in the summer of 2016, this conversation with the Ghanaian photographer James Barnor moves from the Baby Brownie of his schoolteaching years to the Ever Young studio in Accra, the independence celebrations of March 1957, and his double life in Britain as both photographer and colour printer for Drum.
The interview is reproduced in full from the original transcript.
I am in London with James Barnor, who kindly agreed to this interview.
How did your passion for photography begin?
I've loved photography since I was a little boy, because photography was in my family. I had two uncles who were both photographers, and a cousin who was also a professional portrait photographer. So I've loved photography from childhood.
When I finished school, my brother was a train driver in Kumasi, so I went there first. I tried to find work on a newspaper, but not for very long, and I found I was wasting my time. When I went back home, my mother told me that the school where I had been teaching before wanted me. That's how I went back to teach. When I was still a schoolboy I had been teaching in the infant school, so they knew me.
And it was while I was at the school that somebody gave me a small camera. It was called a Baby Brownie. It takes 127, not 120 or 620, 127. That's what I started with, before I got a Kodak 620. And then slowly, later, I went to be an apprentice. That's how I came into photography.
Can you tell me about the Ever Young studio?
Ever Young was a novelty. I was both a newspaper photographer and a studio photographer. I was trained as a photographer in a studio, taking portraits, and the main idea was to make the face look younger. We did a lot of pencil retouching, working on the face on the negative to make the old face look younger. That's where I got the name Ever Young. So I was able to do that and keep that, as well as go out into the street to do newspaper photography.
In that period (from '53, when I opened my big studio, until '59, when I left) I covered a lot of things. The independence celebrations, and portraits of many people in Ghana. The ordinary man, as we say, and also important people who came to my studio for portraiture.
In portraiture at that time you needed to work on glass plates, and mostly you printed by contact. If you wanted a postcard, you used a postcard negative plate to get your negative, then you retouched it and printed it by contact. There was no idea of enlargement, and no need for it. Later, if the person wanted an enlargement, you had to find a means of making it. But full plate, half plate, postcard, CDV (for passports) were all taken on glass plates, before sheet films were invented or introduced. I was using glass plates before sheet films.
With sheet film it's the same size as the camera, the same plate size you are working in, but when it falls down it doesn't break. It scratches, but it doesn't break, which was an advantage over the plate negatives. It was interesting to work in a studio and also be able to jump outside with a Rolleiflex and take newspaper photographs.
How did your work change with the arrival of colour?
From the time I started as an apprentice for two years, and then worked on my own for another ten years, colour was not in my dictionary at all. I didn't think of colour, I didn't know anything about colour. It was when I came to Britain that I started colour.
And fortunately, I went into colour in two ways. One as a visual aid; and I also went into colour as a colour technician, developing and printing in a colour laboratory. So I was both a photographer and a colour printer. That's why my interest in colour, and the influence of colour in my photography, is unique. I changed my black and white into colour portraits for visual aids, as well as for the covers of Drum, which needed high quality. And I was able to develop and print as well. So my interest in colour was quite different.
In a few months it will be sixty years since Ghana's independence. Can you tell me about your experience?
Yes, Ghana's independence was 1957. We had a period of about six to seven years, from 1951 to '57, to prepare Ghana to take over. And the date was set for the 6th of March.
And I was a photographer. I was selected by an overseas picture agency called Black Star to represent them and take pictures. So I was in the thick of it during the independence. The whole world press descended on Ghana on the 6th of March 1957, and I happened to be in almost everything.
That was an experience in my life, the first time that I did really big work, met overseas pressmen and saw how they worked, fast, and the gadgets that they used that I hadn't seen before. But I went through that.
And after so many years, now we are going to celebrate 60 years of independence. My pictures are going to be exhibited during the celebration of the 60th, Ghana at 60. That will be another pride in my life: to show the pictures I took during the independence, and later on what I've taken, including what developments have come to my photography during my lifetime. So I'm looking forward to the 6th of March 2017. That's going to be wonderful.
Interview conducted by Antonella Pisilli. London, 28 August 2016.