James Barnor, Le Style dans le viseur

Founded in South Africa in 1951, Drum was an essential platform that helped showcase a generation of emerging African journalists committed to the struggle against Apartheid. The magazine openly supported Pan Africanism and saw its influence spread across Africa and then onto international audiences.  

James Barnor started working for Drum on an occasional basis in 1952, one year before opening his famous Ever Young photographic studio in Accra. He moved to England in the late 1950s and he would spend the next decade there, taking photographs for Drum magazine, working in a color processing laboratory (the CPL), while also pursuing his studies at the Medway College of Art. With his keen eye for street style and his newly acquired skills in color photography, Barnor eloquently captured for Drum the convergence between Swinging London and the daily experiences of the African diaspora in the British capital of the 1960s.  

Barnor’s work stands out for the place it gives to African women, whom he represents in the full diversity of their trajectories and identities. Through the construction of visual narratives, the photographer makes these women the embodiment of a modern, independent, and sophisticated femininity, departing from the models of beauty privileged by the Western fashion press. The portraits and stories on display in the alcoves of the Galerie Valois convey the effervescence of a key moment in James Barnor’s lengthy career, comprising at once a collective portrait of the diaspora and a new reading of the history of fashion photography.