James Barnor — The Roadmaker

This photobook by James Barnor, published by RRB Photobooks in 2021, is part of the Darwin collection because it threads together a singular career that spans the visual landscapes of Accra and London from the 1950s onward, revealing a practice shaped as much by modernist experimentation as by lived postcolonial transitions. The Roadmaker is both a retrospective and a metaphor: Barnor builds a visual road through independence, migration, diaspora, and return.

As Ghana’s first international press photographer, Barnor captured Accra on the cusp of independence with luminous studio portraits and vivid streetscapes, before relocating to the UK where he photographed Black British life in a newly multicultural London. The book moves across these geographies and decades with ease—from intimate black-and-white images of hair salons and homes to staged colour portraits bathed in the palettes of 1970s fashion, always balancing documentary immediacy with a formal elegance.

The publication accompanied exhibitions at Bristol Museum and the Serpentine in 2021, and includes an essay by Dr Damarice Amao that helps situate Barnor’s output within the wider context of African modernism and diasporic identity. Tactile and expansive, The Roadmaker is not just a survey of images, but a roadmap of one man’s crossings between continents, mediums, and eras—photography as a bridge across time.

Technical Sheet

Title: James Barnor — The Roadmaker
Artist / Author: James Barnor
Date: 2021
Technique / Printing Method: Black-and-white and colour photography
Medium / Materials: Hardback with cloth cover
Dimensions (cm): 27.5 × 30
Pages: 64
Publisher / Editor: RRB Photobooks
Language: English
Condition: New