James Barnor’s *Stories: Pictures from the Archive* gathers work made between 1949 and 1983, tracing a photographic life shaped between Accra and London. Published in 2022 by RRB PhotoBooks, the 300-page hardcover accompanied the LUMA Foundation exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles, Barnor’s first retrospective in France. Its chronological movement between West Africa and the United Kingdom places individual photographs within the wider social and visual transformations of the post-war period.
Barnor’s practice began in Accra, where he established a studio and worked as a press photographer during the years leading to Ghana’s independence in 1957. In London, from 1959 to 1969, his pictures turned toward African diasporic life amid the culture of the 1960s, while his adoption of colour expanded his technical and expressive range. Returning to Ghana in 1970, he helped develop colour-processing practice locally and continued to work across studio, editorial, and commissioned photography into the early 1980s.
The book’s particular strength lies in the way it brings recognised images into relation with the conditions of their making. Studio and press work, commissioned assignments, working methods, and personal archival material are presented as connected parts of a career rather than as separate categories. This approach gives the photographs historical texture while preserving their directness and variety.
For collectors concerned with twentieth-century photography, African modernity, and the visual history of migration, the book offers a substantial reference to a practice that crosses national, professional, and photographic boundaries. Its importance rests not only in the range of Barnor’s images, but in the coherent account it gives of a photographer whose movements between Ghana and Britain illuminate a broader transcontinental history of photography.
