James Barnor, Stories. Pictures from the Archive (1947-1987): LUMA Arles

In 1947, as the first demonstrations calling for Ghana's independence were taking place, the young James Barnor began training in a photographic studio in Accra. His career was launched. In 1987, it took a last change of direction after he ceased working as an official government photographer. Over the next four decades, driven by his limitless curiosity for the photographic medium, but also by sometimes difficult economic conditions that compelled him to reinvent himself, Barnor constantly moved around the gamut of photographic professions. His trajectory has revolved between the two poles of a world he has made for himself: Accra, his birthplace, and London, his adopted city.For his first retrospective in France, James Barnor has assembled, with LUMA, a completely original portfolio of his favourite images. These were selected by re-examining his vast archive of 30,000 negatives and several hundred prints and period documents. The exhibition has been organised to allow a comparison of the images and archives so as to cast light on the context of their production. It also gives plentiful space to the comments of the photographer, now ninety-three years old and a veritable archive of information that enlivens the myriad stories represented in his images.Following a chronological sequence, we travel from Ghana in the 1950s to the United Kingdom in the 1960s, then back to Ghana from the 1970s onwards. Whereas his work joins that of other West African photographers of the same generation, who are now well known, his continual departures and returns have made him part of a transcontinental history of photography that has not yet received great attention.Barnor's images bring to life the utopia of a shared world, one that transcends the nationalisms of the second half of the 20th century. Long side-lined, today these images inspire a new generation of artists who are fighting to represent blackness around the world.The exhibition James Barnor: Stories. Pictures from the Archive (1947-1987) is presented as part of the Rencontres d’Arles and LUMA’s Living Archives Programme.