A History with Colour; James Barnor By Beth Carrick

The Serpentine Gallery currently hosts a retrospective of the modernist photographer, James Barnor. Moving between Accra and London, the retrospective covers Barnor’s quiet international success between 1950-1970s. The work of the 92-year-old Ghanaian photographer crosses the boundaries of commercial, studio, documentary, and fashion photography in this exhibition that curates his career from his vast personal archives. On entering the whitewashed building I am greeted with a reminder of the repetitious COVID regulations: wear your mask, sanitize your hands, one way system, please. But by the first few images I am drawn into a monochrome world of intimate studio photographs of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, and sportsmen from another time and another world, far from the Serpentine. We are guided into a cavernous room where a glass cabinet is filled with similarly intimate reflections on Barnor’s career: from small printed images of friends and family, a Kodak wallet with a picture of his first studio in Accra (Ever Young), his cover images for Drum magazine (a South African anti-apartheid magazine that increasingly featured afro diasporic global communities), and a record of lighting techniques amongst other archival material. All of the material in this first half of the gallery introduces Barnor’s early career in the moments before the independence of Ghana from British rule. Throughout the first section, the curation of the photographic archives is punctuated by an undulating rhythm that respects the steady success of Barnor’s career. The curators, Lizzie Carey-Thomas and Awa Konaté, create a balanced narrative: moving from playful subjects, to a feeling of familiarity within documents of community, austere subjects, and back to a sense of familiarity. Every image in this introduction is taken with black and white film and yet the vibrancy of the subjects is not lost. The overlapping patterns of the sitters and their backgrounds creates an impression of colour. Even in the more austere subjects, one of whom was Kwame Nkrumah the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana, Barnor captures the familial dynamism that colours these black and white images. Barnor’s voice reverberates within the walls of the second brick-layered cavernous space. In this aural interview he reflects on his work, noting that his visual archive is primarily made up of black and white film. He says that through a concentration on the light effect he got to know the effect of black skin in cameras. It allowed him to concentrate on features of the face and how deliberate lighting, such as a large flash bouncing light off anywhere but the sitter, corresponds with the character of the subject. As I turn the corner of the snaking space, colour emerges. From the handful of colour images in the exhibition it is clear the 1960s was a pivotal moment in Barnor getting to grips with colour photography. Through blown up images of Drum magazine cover girls and in friendly documents of his interracial group of London friends. Barnor’s expertise in colour began in his time in the UK where he took lessons in the colour processing laboratory in Kent. Returning to Accra in 1970, Barnor became the manager of photographic equipment and materials manufacturer, Agfa-Gevaert, where he shared what he had learnt in the UK on colour production. The vibrancy of the colours in the street portrait of the Sick Hagenmeyer shop assistant captures the dynamic character of the subject and her surroundings, standing as a masterclass in colour photography. Disclosure: Prior to entering the Serpentine space, I had come to know Barnor as a pioneer of colour processing. I admit I was restlessly pacing through the exhibition to get to the point where colour would explode from the walls from his mastery. I was disappointed, to say the least. Colour photography has often been disputed in the photographic art canon. In 1935, Eastman Kodak released the first coloured film, Kodachrome. This was largely used by professionals but by the 1970s the cost of colour film was dropping which meant amateurs were hopping onto this new multi-tonal wave. From this point onwards, colour became regarded as ‘amateurish’. Photographers like Helmut Newton, who started out in the 1980s, argued that there was no room for colour in professional photography as he believed it detracted from the subject and made it less ‘proper’. By contrast, William Eggleston visually argued the case for colour photography throughout his career. For a Ghanaian artist in the Western context of the Serpentine Gallery, colour photography takes on a new significance. According to Lorna Roth in her article “Looking at Shirley, The Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity”, until the mid-1960s it was generally assumed in the West that photography technology was neutral in its representation of skin tone. But as camera technology became accessible to the non-white population, criticism of racial bias in the technology began to emerge. One criticism that was called out was that the ‘neutral’ technology would often reduce darker tones to a flat ashen tone and disproportionately highlight the whites of the subject’s teeth. In the period which Barnor’s retrospective covers (50s-70s), photographers who photographed non-white subjects were learning to manipulate their technology through trial and error, Barnor being one of them. He had a rich understanding of how to photograph and produce images of subjects with darker tones. In 1973, Barnor opened up the first colour processing lab and studio in Ghana, Studio X23 where he shared his expertise in lighting and colour. Barnor’s co-option of colour production symbolises a significant moment in the canon of modern photography. Given that Twitter has recently come under attack for their algorithm that crops the preview images in preference for lighter tones, highlighting the fact that technology continues to perpetuate social divisions, you would think that the curator’s would actively highlight the symbolic significance of this moment in Barnor’s career. It is left to the visitor to piece these parts of the wider narrative of race and photography together. It is especially significant to highlight Barnor’s achievements in colour since, sitting across the plane of green in Mayfair, sits what is described as a conclusive exhibit of the ‘BEST’ photographers of the 20th century, featuring Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Mario Testino, Don McCullin among others. Although Barnor’s work of course stands up on its own and it would be a terrible oversight to align the success of a longstanding photographer with the recent widespread racial reckoning, I feel the curators missed a trick whilst glossing over the tense relationship between race and the camera and therefore not fully making steps to decolonise the technology and the art.