Essays
How One Photographer Documented Ghana’s Transformations
Gerald Annan-Forson portrayed Ghana in the 1970s from an intimate perspective, telling a spectacular story of political and social change.
Gerald Annan-Forson seeks offbeat images in routine social scenes and during spectacular events. His first job as a professional photographer was taking secret pictures for a private investigator, capturing evidence of cheating spouses and people faking injuries for insurance scams in 1970s California. This required technical precision and a bold eye for visual reportage. Traces of his reflex for catching people in the act, for freezing a moment in time to tell a complex story, permeate his photographic practice, lending it both a narrative sensibility and an ethereal character.
Annan-Forson was born in London in 1947, to a mother from Kildare, Ireland, and a Fante father from the Gold Coast, an officer with the British West African Frontier Force stationed in the UK during World War II. In London, to hide his color and avoid racist attacks, Annan-Forson’s mother had to wrap him in a blanket when they traveled. The family moved to Accra in 1954 to be a part of the Gold Coast’s fight for freedom from British colonial rule. But in the passionate racial and national struggle, the young Annan- Forson was often confronted for being a foreigner, due to his mixed ancestry. In 1957, the new nation of Ghana won independence under the leadership of the Pan-African politician Kwame Nkrumah, and the capital of Accra became a cosmopolitan global center of Pan-African artistic expression and political thought.
Annan-Forson learned photography and image developing with a pinhole camera at a central Accra studio. The experience of being seen as Black and foreign in Britain and white and foreign in Ghana shaped his desire to challenge the idea that identities are singular. Like that of many artists who have multiple sociocultural fluencies, his aesthetic practice has been a response to his status as a constant outsider. Photography became his way to grapple with this double form of exclusion and seek refuge from racial violence. Taking pictures allowed him to move through the world while hiding in plain sight and sidestepping simplistic facades of public belonging by telling multilayered tales.
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His photographic journey reflects the variegated political history of Ghana more than other image makers who have covered the same terrain. He grew up during the renaissance decade of independence-era Accra, when it became a magnetic hub for radical Black thinkers, musicians, and artists from around the world. The city evolved rapidly as Nkrumah sought to modernize the country and create a strong Pan-African socialist state. But in 1966, this revolutionary experiment ended when the government was overthrown by senior military and police officers in a US-and British-backed coup d’état. Ghana was restructured under a neoliberal capitalist regime, which in 1972 was also overthrown in a coup. Over two decades, as Ghana alternated between civilian and military regimes, the rising generation of artists and intellectuals blended Pan-Africanism, futurist aspiration, and myriad local expressive styles into a uniquely West African modernist aesthetic.
Annan-Forson returned to Accra from California in the mid-1970s and began to develop his visual approach by documenting the changing city and its eclectic, diverse inhabitants. He worked across genres and styles as a freelancer, photographing heads of state and national events and selling pictures to New African, African Business, West Africa, Essence, and international magazines and newspapers. Even as radical ideas of Pan-African political unity were diluted, Accra was alive with highlife and Afrobeat music and celebrations of global Black styles. A rising generation sought new dreams and hustles that were at once locally grounded and cosmopolitan. Two of his early major assignments were to capture the visit of Charles, the Prince of Wales, with the head of state General I. K. Acheampong, in 1977—an unusual pairing of old imperial ruler with young defiant military officer—and, in 1980, to photograph the arrival in Ghana of the pope, not long after another coup. Annan-Forson’s camera witnessed the mix of political ideologies, social pleasures, and economic struggles of 1970s and 1980s Accra, a city characterized by its easy intimacies and stark contrasts. His images highlight juxtapositions that express the contradictions of life in the coastal capital after the celebrations of independence faded.
Annan-Forson’s images challenge colonial modes for organizing a visual language of African urban social and political life.
Annan-Forson’s photographs are hard to categorize. They encompass street photography, documentary, portraiture, landscape, and abstraction. His archive organically challenges colonial modes for organizing a visual language of African urban social and political life. In his relationships with his subjects, he implicitly counters pervasive orientalist image-making practices, creating what the curator Okwui Enwezor has described in relation to postindependence African photography as a “different iconography of the African self.” In the colonial lexicon, photographs of Africa were means of objectification drawing on tourism and travel, ethnography and documentation, administrative fixity and exoticizing obsession. Instead, Annan-Forson finds vibrant, quirky uncertainties and moments of personal recognition within public events and spaces. He often uses compositional doubling, pairing contrasting figures he finds in a social scene. Annan-Forson’s image making reflects the ways Accra’s citizenry navigates the multiplicity of its dynamic landscape and shows how life in the city requires people to be many things in rapid succession.
Annan-Forson was thrown into political change when a coup d’état on June 4, 1979, elevated Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings as chairman of the new ruling Armed Forces Revolutionary Council. Annan-Forson had been schoolmates with Rawlings and suddenly found himself with insider access to a revolution. Rawlings, like Annan-Forson, was of mixed European and Ghanaian ancestry, and at times the photographer was mistaken for the head of state. Annan-Forson documented key national transformations from an intimate perspective, telling the spectacular story of change through the candid eyes of major players as well as common people caught in unexpected moments of terror, joy, contemplation, and frustration. He was an observer at the center of power. As a photographer among soldiers he documented the tenuous ways power was formulated.
But the pressure of taking pictures in the midst of political upheaval took its toll, as he was constantly on call to capture everything from executions to trials to clandestine meetings. Soldiers woke him up at all hours to record secret military maneuvers and meetings, the whipping of market traders accused of hoarding commodities, and surreptitious images of the country from a military fighter jet re-creating the experience of an aerial battle. His camera followed Rawlings over several decades of transformations: rebel, populist revolutionary, authoritarian leader, and democratic president.
On one level, Annan-Forson’s work is engaged in a grand scheme of mythmaking, reimagining an African urban future. On another, his images expose cracks in the edifice of the normative and the powerful, and how they are challenged by contradiction, humor, pleasure, and pain. His work often focuses on the aesthetics and rituals of power, revealing how authority is conferred through ceremony. But his ability to find the intimate within formal portraits of leaders shows how authority is always partial, temporary, and unstable. He seizes on signs that disrupt expectations, revealing the inner lives of his subjects through unexpected downcast eyes, hidden glances, and quirky gestures. When public figures are caught off guard, we see another side of power. At its core, Annan-Forson’s work illustrates the contradictions that emerge in periods and spaces of transformation. His visual grammar, refined over a lifetime of taking pictures, provokes observers to ask what kind of mythic landscape the contemporary decolonizing city constitutes.
All photographs courtesy the artist
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”