Born in Ghana in 1929, James Barnor opened his renowned Ever Young studio in Accra, where he immortalized a nation at the moment of its independence. He was one of the first photojournalists to collaborate with The Daily Graphic, a newspaper published in Ghana by London’s Daily Mirror Group. In 1959, two years after Ghana’s independence, Barnor moved to London to deepen his technical knowledge of the medium. He discovered colour photography at the Medway College of Art and his pictures were published on the front page of Drum, an important magazine founded in South Africa in 1951 and symbol of the anti-apartheid movement. He eloquently captured the spirit of Swinging London and the experiences of the African diaspora in the British capital.
In the late 1960s, he was recruited by Agfa-Gevaert and returned to Ghana to set up the country’s first colour laboratory. He stayed there for the next twenty years, working in his new Studio X23 as a freelance photographer and for state agencies in Accra. Today, Barnor lives in the United Kingdom and devotes most of his time to his work, in a spirit of transmission.
Barnor’s work has recently given rise to numerous exhibitions and publications, including a touring retrospective curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, shown at the Serpentine in London in 2021, MASI Lugano, Switzerland, in 2022 and the Detroit Institute of Art, MI, USA in 2023. James Barnor: Stories, Pictures from the Archive (1947-1987), curated by Matthieu Humery, opened at LUMA Arles, France in 2022, and was marked by the launch of the James Barnor Prize, dedicated to African photographers.
In October 2023, James Barnor, Studio of Life opened at FOMU Antwerp, in Belgium. Coinciding with the photographer’s 95th birthday, the James Barnor 95 Festival opened in Accra and Tamale in May 2024, with a month-long programme celebrating Barnor’s legacy and Ghana’s cultural art scene.
Makda Embaie (b. 1994) is an artist and poet based in Oslo. She is educated at the Kunsthøhskolen in Oslo, Konstfack, Royal institute of art and Biskop Arnö Writers' School. The nation-state, language, colonialism and family are central concepts that she explores by looking closely at specific characteristics in e.g. language through film, photo, sound, and spatial installations. Previous exhibitions include the sound installation “If joy was the door, what would be the room?” At the Malmö Art Museum in the Latvian Collection, "The Geography of Cups" in the project (Re)Learning the Archive at the Design Archive and "Now when we've been together" which has been shown at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo.
