13 Facts About James Barnor

James Barnor has spoken of how his work was rediscovered in 2007 during the "Ghana at 50" jubilee season by curator Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, who organised the first exhibition of his photographs at Black Cultural Archives.

Appreciation of his work as a studio portraitist, photojournalist and Black lifestyle photographer has been further heightened since 2010 when a major solo retrospective exhibition of his photographs, Ever Young: James Barnor, was mounted at Rivington Place, London, followed by a series of exhibitions including in the United States and South Africa.

James Barnor's photographs were collated by the non-profit agency Autograph ABP during a four-year project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and in 2011 became part of the new Archive and Research Centre for Culturally Diverse Photography.

James Barnor's photographs have in recent years had showings in Ghana, France, The Netherlands.

Frederick Seton James Barnor was born in Accra, in what was then the Gold Coast, West Africa.

When his landlord wanted to reclaim the room, from 1953 James Barnor began to operate his Ever Young Studio.

James Barnor sold photographs to other publications, notably the South African magazine Drum, which covered news, politics and entertainment.

Drum was founded in 1951 by Jim Bailey, with whom James Barnor established an ongoing relationship, using the magazine's Fleet Street office as his base when he first went to London.

In 1994, James Barnor returned to London, where his work latterly began to be discovered by a new wider audience, through exhibitions at venues such as Black Cultural Archives, Rivington Place, and elsewhere.

The first major solo retrospective exhibition of Barnor's photographs, Ever Young: James Barnor, was mounted at Rivington Place in London from September to November 2010, curated by Renee Mussai of Autograph ABP's Archive and Research Centre.

Ever Young: James Barnor toured to Impressions Gallery, Bradford, exhibited from 5 July to 31 August 2013.

James Barnor is featured in the exhibition Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s-1990s that opened in 2015, the culmination of a seven-year collaborative project between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, showcasing a number of black British photographers and images of black Britain from the 1950s to the 1990s.

In October 2015, James Barnor's work was shown in Paris at the Galerie Clementine de la Feronniere in an exhibition entitled Ever Young that created "a narrative of two societies in transition".