Jan Banning’s The Sweating Subject presents a series of group portraits made with tribal chiefs and their courts in Ghana’s Northern Territories. Banning, a Dutch photographer, traveled there on assignment to document the mixing of tradition and modernity; during that work he was invited by the chiefs to be photographed alongside them. The resulting images belong to the Gonda or Dagomba communities, yet Banning appears in every frame—a white European seated among men in heavy ceremonial dress. The project turns on a deliberate inversion of the usual colonial tableau, in which the visiting photographer poses as the central authority. Here the camera position and lighting may be his, but he is also an object: the shutter was released by his driver or an interpreter, making these selfies without self-determination.
That gap between authorial control and surrender gives the work its tension. The chiefs and courtiers, despite the heat of their garments, look proud, dignified and at home; Banning looks misplaced and perspiring. His title names the physical evidence of that discomfort. What might have been a simple record of an encounter becomes a study of posture, climate and power, with the photographer visibly unequal to the setting.
Nazraeli Press issues the book as part of One Picture Book Two, a series format that pairs a small hardcover with an original signed photograph. This volume runs to 16 pages and 15 four-color plates, and is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5×7 inch print signed by the artist. The compact sequence and the accompanying print make the project available as both a concentrated viewing experience and a collectible object.
For collectors, the appeal lies in that combination: a focused body of work by a photographer known for examining how power is staged, in a publisher’s series that treats the photobook and the print as complementary. The Sweating Subject is not an expansive monograph but a taut, self-aware episode, and its wit and unease survive the small scale. It rewards attention to the politics of the pose and to the book as a deliberate container for that argument.
