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Extended relatives, parents, neighbors, colleagues, and friends flocked to the event, and the pair’s pooled resources covered the core components of the ceremony—a white dress, a black suit, the priest, flowers, tie, and crucially, the wedding photographer. One such image shows them standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Church in Woolwich, London, self-assured, looking forward. Flanked by his brothers, Ekow and Josbert, and her soon-to-be sister-in-law, Elaine Buckle. Deliberate and studied, the picture depicts a fledgling family on the cusp of life together, in a city straining to comprehend the distinct multiplicities of experience across the African continent, the Caribbean, and India. These communities would articulate themselves alongside and in relation to one another to form 20th century Black Britain.

The newlyweds were relatively new to London, Ghanaian immigrants by way of Nigeria. Kwame had received a scholarship from the University of Ibadan to train as an engineer at Woolwich Polytechnic, and Betty was stationed at Ascot, working to be an orthopedic nurse. They had courted for five years, two of which consisted of daily handwritten correspondence—the likes of which seem deeply enchanting and somewhat incomprehensible from 2021. Their first proper meeting was at an annual reception organized by the West African Students Union. He spotted her in the crowd, strode over, and stated, “As soon as I graduate, we will be married.” Perhaps not the most romantic proposal, but startlingly prophetic.

That same clarity of vision mapped onto his garment selection for the special day. While Betty fretted for months over silhouette, material, and detail, he made a single visit to Burtons and selected an understated, elegant design for his suit. Black, with pinstripes. An amethyst pocket square—to match her flowers. The jacket resembled others he wore during that time, a single-breasted woolen situation with a strong cut to emphasize his shoulders, paired with a crisp white button-down shirt, which he ironed without fail, and a rotation of silk ties that he savored.

But this suit was different. According to Betty, “he saw it as the outfit that brought him love.” He treated it with reverence. He wore it once again for his brother Josbert’s wedding to Elaine, but nary beyond that. At some point, her wedding dress was lost to the bureaucratic glitches of a peripatetic lifestyle—in a suitcase on a conveyor belt to nowhere. Meanwhile the suit remained, hanging in the back of his closet, intermittently brought out to be dry-cleaned over the course of six decades, as the couple moved to Canada, then the United States, then Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and finally Nigeria again.

A couple months before his death on the 21st of November 2019, Kwame wrote out a request that he be buried in his wedding suit. Beyond the widespread sentiment of “meeting your maker in style,” this gesture struck me as a deeply photographic one. While standing over his casket in the humid Lagos air, all I could think of were his wedding pictures—the only other physical remnants of my grandparents’ special day in 1959. With this anticipatory posthumous action, my grandfather had fixed a particular image of himself, creating a means of visual relation mediated through his marital photograph. In so doing, he created a salve for us who mourned him, through the reminder of a moment of happiness. He knew how images functioned, and this was how he wanted to be remembered, ensconced in love.

As we followed the blaring brass band and pallbearers dancing his casket, with tear-streaked faces and sweating brows, I couldn’t shake the fact of that wedding picture. Of its significance for him, but also its function in relation to a generation of West African men like him. Those who worked against colonial systems of representation, through adherence to visual politics of respectability. Those who viewed physical mobility as a means of social mobility, whose experiences of everyday life were animated by the undoing of colonial regimes. Who were beneficiaries of European educational systems, and who returned to their home countries in order to pursue postcolonial possibilities.

Their weddings were speckled across London, from Woolwich to Kilburn. They were festive, stylish affairs in the face of a dour, regimented urban space—documented by the perennially present wedding photographer. One such image-maker, the young Ghanaian James Barnor, would capture the gentle fall of tulle floating outward as a bride clambered out of her town car, the sharp point of her white stiletto hitting the street, matching those of her bridesmaid’s, paired with ochre stockings and sheer white gloves. Undertones of race, class, and gender mediated photographic forms of relation—between beaming friends posed together as reception attendees for the happy couple, or bridal parties and hired drivers—all offering moments of simultaneous connection and tension. Importantly, as art historian and critic Kobena Mercer has argued, “Barnor’s images suggest that 'Africa' has never been a static entity, confined to the boundaries of geography, but has always had a diasporic dimension.”

Barnor first arrived in London three months after the Duncans were wed, having already built a career for himself in Accra. He has said, “I came two years after Independence. I had this urge to see 'the motherland,' to know more and learn more, to increase my knowledge of photography. Not necessarily to make money, because at that time, my Ever Young Studio was already known and doing well in Accra.” Indeed, Barnor’s studio in Jamestown, founded in the early 50s, served a particular function in the Ghanaian context. According to him, “the first photographers I remember were the police photographers: when there was an accident or crime scene, one particular police photographer would turn up and act as if he were the ruler of the whole scene…There were other photographers, official wedding photographers and also amateur photographers, people with big box cameras going about and taking pictures.” For Barnor, photographic portraits completed a specific kind of representational work. They marked an occasion. Before attending the function, one had to be imaged. “If you were going to a wedding, to go to a studio and get your photograph taken was a big appointment.”

But West African photographic portraiture—now synonymous with the spectacular yet over-cited studio portraits of Seydou Keïta and lively snapshots of Malick Sidibé—was not Barnor’s only wheelhouse. He also served as Ghana’s first photojournalist, working for the Daily Graphic starting in 1950, taking images of public figures vital to social life in Accra at the time, from super featherweight champion boxer Roy “The Black Flash” Ankrah, to the country’s first prime minister and president, Kwame Nkrumah.
With a granular sensitivity to gesture and bodily expression, Barnor had a knack for portraying Nkrumah in moments of levity. A political figure well known for deploying self-presentation strategically—replete in billowing folds of kente cloth to receive British monarchs—Nkrumah, through Barnor’s lens, is the picture of strength and vibrancy. Mid-stride, he kicks off a football at center field in leather shoes and a double-breasted suit. His right foot is a blurred stroke, his smile remains intact. The rest of his body is erect, and in control. His Prison Graduate Cap is unmoved. Rendered in monochrome it almost blends into Accra’s cloudless sky.

Themes of politics, culture, and style sustained through Barnor’s work in the so-called metropole manifest most strongly in his work for Drum, the anti-apartheid magazine founded by Jim Bailey, with South African photographic counterparts including the likes of Ernest Cole, Peter Magubane, and Bob Gosani. Barnor’s connection to Drum provided a warm welcome for his photographic work in London. He has said, “being a small fry at the time in Britain—nobody here knew who I was…but because I had successfully worked with Drum in Ghana during the 1950s, they gave me the exposure. It was my association with [the] magazine that opened all kinds of doors for me as a photographer in London.”

Barnor’s images from this period, often shot at midrange and varying widely in subject matter, are deftly composed frames of Londoners in action and repose. Particularly, his effervescent images of Drum cover girls such as Selby Thompson, Erlin Ibrek, and Marie Hallowi became alluring iconic visions of Afro-diasporic glamor. An image of legendary radio broadcaster Mike Eghan situates him squarely, as he descends the steps of a fountain at Piccadilly Circus. His long, thin, black tie perfectly bifurcates his torso, arms spread akimbo against the dense accretion of signage and fluorescent lettering of the city. Eghan is boisterous and dynamic, a Ghanaian Brit staking a claim on one of his cities.

Ever on the move, Barnor returned to Ghana in the 70s, where he founded the country’s first color processing lab. Eventually, he moved back to London in the 90s, where he still lives today. Barnor’s cumulative oeuvre stands as what curator and art historian Renée Mussai has described as “a singular portfolio of street and studio portraiture depicting societies in transition: images of a burgeoning sub-Saharan African nation moving toward independence, and a European capital city becoming a multicultural metropolis.” Beyond this photographic landscape of dual relations, the mobility of Barnor’s photographs themselves is intriguing to chart—especially in light of his current retrospective, Accra/London, on view at the Serpentine through October 22nd, 2021.

As Mercer astutely notes, with Barnor’s images, “photos initially intended for private exchange among family members, or made to meet newspaper deadlines only then to be discarded, are, by virtue of being repositioned as art on gallery walls, and given new value as objects of aesthetic attention and as makers of the emergence of a new world.” In this statement, it is clear to me that context is critical to the making of a genre of photographic practice—particularly that of West African portraiture. What are the stakes of the photographic relations of production, and how do they differ from those of reception and circulation? And, what does it mean for a generation of photographic practitioners and subjects that have inherited this imagery? Rather than offering an answer, I suggest a different angle—the making of the cover of Aromanticism. A poetic, collaborative divergence in photographic and sonic form.

In 2012, the photographer Eric Gyamfi and musician Moses Sumney met in Accra, introduced through a mutual friend at the University of Legon. The two Ghanaians quickly fell into step, both physically and conceptually, and began making pictures together. These were improvised experiments, mutually produced between subject and photographer. Neither remembers precisely when the process started, but both attest to the importance of play to the making of their images. Sumney would return to Accra every year, and the artists would spend time together thinking, hanging out, and making images. Sumney told me, laughing “Eric showed me things I had never seen before, like Björk music videos. We would just be there in his house, watching on his old laptop. I think there was a comfort level between us, like you can be here [in Accra] and be challenging the norm and thinking beyond what’s in front of you.”

This sense of openness to the unexpected was key to making the visual vocabulary that the two have developed over the course of seven years. The foundation of their photographic process has been organic forms of relation, without a singular purpose. Modes of play and experimentation are paramount. Gyamfi told me, “A lot of our collaboration has hinged on finding, or uncovering, or chance. There’s a lot of giving up the need to control the outcome, and allowing for various other elements that may not otherwise have a say in the image, becoming a part of it. We worked free-form.” During this time, Sumney began recording Aromanticism, and then in March 2017 when it was time to shoot the cover for the album, he abandoned a tour season in London midway and headed to Accra to make images with Gyamfi over a few days. According to Sumney, “It was important, not only that there was a familiarity between Eric and I, but also a visual language that had already been established. And even better that most of that language was not available to the world. It was just between us.”

The resulting picture of that session is what one might call the ultimate anti-portrait. Sumney’s figure seems effortlessly suspended in front of a white blank space, his back turned to the camera—nude from the waist up. The dusty concrete floor is legible about a half a meter below his booted feet; his torso turned concave, his head bowed down so low it disappears. Instead of Sumney’s face, the bodily feature of interest are his hands—clasped together behind his back, central to the photograph. “As if they’re almost praying, or begging,” Sumney said. Made at an amphitheater behind the Museum of Science and Technology, Gyamfi remembers that session as something akin to dance or performance. He said, “I think Moses is very much for the obscure and the strange. Deep down I have similar inclinations.”

That all of Gyamfi’s images of Sumney were taken in Ghana, including the lush painterly composition that serves as the cover for the 2020 album Grae, poses a subtle intervention into the geopolitical and aesthetic associations that seem to reign supreme in relation to the genre of West African photographic portraiture. Gyamfi’s approach to photographs are rooted in the history of the medium, but treats it with a kind of irreverence that is deeply productive. His images draw out tensions in relation to photographic representation, and forecloses the possibility for clear readings. However, this indeterminacy does not diminish the importance of these portraits. They are just as relevant to the zeitgeist, but operate on a markedly different register—that of sonic compliment and playful experimentation. These images of languid limbs and suspended postures emit what filmmaker and artist Cauleen Smith would call a “photographic potency” that refutes simply signifying presence.

While Sumney has taken those images toward the cultivation of a musical persona that revels in the strange and solitary, Gyamfi has pursued a way of thinking where he reconfigures the familiar in order to make it strange. His critically-acclaimed 2018 series, “Fixing Shadows: Julius and I,” found the artist producing ten thousand cyanotypes depicting various iterations of a combination between a self-portrait and a portrait of the late minimalist composer Julius Eastman. Gyamfi says, “If you look at the portrait of Eastman and myself, some of them are very seamless, so it looks like an actual person that you could find somewhere. But then upon closer inspection, you realize that these are non-living people, these are people that don’t exist. And then it becomes strange.” The lens he brings to these images is one that calls into question larger expectations, and protocols of viewing that often are brought to images of West African portraiture—whether contemporary or modern, in family albums or fine art contexts. Gyamfi warns us, “It’s important not to overdetermine things. All of these politics and philosophies have their roots in the everyday. We observe everyday life in order to create paradigms about certain things, they can all be found in life. They can all be located there. So the challenge, really, then, is how to summarize, to condense, and simplify some of these things.” It is a noble way of thinking about photography. A medium that can be distilled to its constituent parts, while ever generating varied functions and forms. Perhaps, even, a kind of poetry in action.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo is a curator and scholar of photography and the Arts of Africa. She is an Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.