James Barnor’s future stars of African photography

There is a different approach to work and to subjects now compared to when I started taking photographs in the 1940s.

In my time, you couldn’t leave wedding portraits to go and try new things. You did what you had to in order to make a living, and portraiture was the thing. I had to take photos of people that they would want to buy. I did not have the luxury of being able to experiment and be as playful as some of these artists.

Things are changing all the time and with every generation new things are coming. I will always encourage young photographers to try their own ideas and to make progress. This generation has so much to say.

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou
b. 1965, Porto-Novo, Benin

Africans have different ways of portraying their culture and art. Right across Africa, especially west Africa, in the Congo and Benin, where this photographer comes from, they wear these clothes to show when they are happy or celebrating. They design shoes to go with their dresses and mask their faces. I feel proud when I see this. The photographer’s work is to record or document. We have very little documentation about our ways of life and our worship. If we had people like these artists capturing what they saw, we would have diverse documentation of all kinds of religions.

Ruth Ginika Ossai
b. 1991, Onitsha and Nsukka, Nigeria

There is an art and a skill to taking photographs of groups. You have to arrange it so that all of their faces appear well enough to make them buy copies. If there are 100 people, you are aiming to get 90 per cent to buy copies — if not all of them. But people are always proud to show their uniforms. They can show the photograph to people and say, “Look at me when I was a nurse” or “This is my dad in the classroom, teaching”. The photograph allows future storytelling.

I’ve only got one group of nurses under training in my whole archive. There was a photographer in Accra who used to go to the nursing training college, so he dominated there, but I had a few friends at the college, and my sister was a nurse, so they came to be photographed. I was so happy that they took the taxi and came to my studio.

Sabelo Mlangeni
b. 1980, Driefontein, South Africa

This picture shows the love of a baby. Everyone is delighted. My favourite photographic subjects are babies and large groups. Sometimes the baby will start crying and nothing will stop it, but you have to have patience. When I started out, I used roll film and a miniature camera to capture babies, because it was faster and you can take a lot more pictures. That’s how I got the image of the baby on all fours. When I see babies like this, I remember taking those photographs.

Edson Chagas
b. 1977, Luanda, Angola

I have dreams about these photographs. The clothes show that we are all human beings, but the masks show different things: those who are sad, those who are happy; when you are laughing, when you open your eyes. They are each like characters. These African masks are vital things, powerful objects and part of a living tradition.

Andrew Esiebo
b. 1978, Lagos, Nigeria

I come from an oil-producing country, but I’ve never seen an oil rig before. At first, this looks like a painting, but it’s so real: the colours are not artificial and you can see activity on all the various stages. In the background, you can see the oil-processing stations and the tanks where the oil is formed.

Mário Macilau
b. 1984, Maputo, Mozambique

In Ghana, where the rubbish is worse than what we see in this photograph of Maputo in Mozambique, people collect parts of these machines to recycle them. They learn to excavate the useful parts from the piles of discarded items and they make a living this way. People even use them to make art.

I like Mário Macilau’s composition here, with the cloud of smoke, the television and the rubbish in the front. In the midst of all the litter, it’s as if there are people watching the television.

Atong Atem
b. 1994, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

This is the style of photography that I worked in and still like best: arranging relatives or friends and making them feel relaxed, at home. In 1949, I had a studio in Accra, and people would come just after weddings or buying new clothes. I had a hotel and a nightclub not very far from me and, as my studio was open day and night, people would come and have their portraits taken after going out. Here Atong Atem has used her friends, all second-generation African immigrants living in Australia, as the models.

Some photographers like to decorate their studios, as Atem has here. Many well-known francophone studios use props because it encourages people to come to them. I had just one or two props; I could lend you a tie. But I like it to be plain to portray you and your fashion — what you feel proud of before you come to the studio. You come to show yourself.

Kudzanai Chiurai
b. 1981, Harare, Zimbabwe

When I worked, I didn’t have the luxury of dressing a model or building up a stage. Everything was done with the bare minimum. So the chance to clothe a model with expensive clothes, and use different styles and backgrounds, as Kudzanai Chiurai has here, would have been completely out of my line of work. With all the help I got from Drum magazine, which helped me get my feet firmly on the ground when I moved from Accra to London, I didn’t get that far. Here, we get the means to show the world that an African can also wear these styles.

“A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” is on show at Tate Modern, London, until January 14 2024

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