The Roadmaker brings together James Barnor’s photographs from a career formed between Ghana and Britain. Published in 2021, this retrospective follows a practice that moves among press photography, studio portraiture, and the changing social worlds of post-war modernity. Its subject is not a single location or period, but the connections between them: independence-era Ghana, multicultural London, and a later Ghana shaped by a pronounced postcolonial identity.

Barnor’s biography gives the work an unusually direct historical reach. Born in 1929, he founded the Ever Young studio in Accra in 1950 and worked for the Daily Graphic and Drum around the time of Ghana’s independence. After moving to Britain in 1959, he continued to develop his photographic practice through study and technical employment. On returning to Accra in 1969, he established X23, described as the city’s first colour photography studio. His career therefore links professional assignment, portraiture, migration, and the emergence of colour as a modern photographic language.

The book’s retrospective arrangement makes this breadth visible without turning it into a simple chronology. The road of its title suggests passages between past and present, tradition and progress, and people shaped by different continents. Barnor’s modernism is particularly apparent in his use of colour, which gives the photographs both social immediacy and formal clarity. The volume also includes an essay by photography historian and curator Dr Damarice Amao, translated into English by Mélissa Laveaux, adding critical context to the selection.

For a serious collector, The Roadmaker merits attention as a concise account of a photographer whose work spans independence, migration, and postcolonial self-definition. It holds together the historical weight of Barnor’s subjects and the visual intelligence of his colour work, while its 2021 publication belongs to a period in which his practice was being newly presented at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery and London’s Serpentine.