In Arles, on the Trail of a Free Africa

In 1949, on the streets of Accra, the Ghanaian capital, a twenty-year-old apprentice photographer sets up a backdrop in the open air and photographs passersby. He names his business Ever Young, after a Scandinavian legend he learned at school: the goddess Iduna watched over an orchard of golden apples that restored youth to weary travelers. “Long before there was Photoshop, I was using a pencil. I would retouch images to make people look younger,” James Barnor recalls.

Four years later, with his savings, he rents the premises of a former brewery in the port district of Jamestown, still in the country’s capital. He does not yet know that he has just opened the first visual chapter of Ghanaian independence. That makeshift studio has found its place today at the Palais de l’Archevêché, the first stop on this route, in the exhibition “Ghana! Dreaming of Independence 1957-1976.”

James Barnor, Gladys Kwakor Owoo, A Worker at Alsalso House, Ever Young Studio, Jamestown, Accra, 1957. Courtesy of the artist and gallery Clémentine de la Féronnière.

Sammy Baloji, Jean-Marie Kayombo, Luanda, Angola, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris.

On March 6, 1957, before the crowds gathered at Accra’s Polo Ground (an actual polo field, today Independence Square), Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of the newly independent Ghana, and a founding figure of Pan-Africanism, spoke words that would mark the continent’s history: “At long last, the battle has ended! And thus, Ghana, your beloved country is free forever!”

To tell the story of this young nation, Nkrumah, now president of the young Republic, invited an already celebrated American photographer, Paul Strand, a pioneer of modern photography. He spent four months in Ghana in 1963, traveling the country, meeting its people, conducting interviews and taking hundreds of photographs. The result was Ghana: An African Portrait, a book of portraits published in 1976, the year of his death. The book itself is part of the exhibition.

“I like to photograph people who have strength and dignity in their faces. Whatever life has done to them, it hasn’t destroyed them,” Strand once wrote. That same dignity is found in Felicia Abban, the country’s first professional photographer, whose studio also opened in Jamestown, in 1955. Alongside playwright Efua Sutherland, young Carlos Idun-Tawiah closes the loop: his image of a Sunday in Accra, taken in 2022, extends James Barnor’s gesture and now graces the poster for this 57th edition of the festival.

Carlos Idun-Tawiah, Many Reasons to Live Again, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Alta.

With the Palais de l’Archevêché behind us, let’s head to La Croisière: photography changes lanes here, taking to the newsstands with the exhibition “Paul Kodjo: Photoromance.” Born in 1939 in the Banco Forest in Abidjan, Paul Kodjo began his career in the early 1960s before studying photography and film in Paris in 1967, where he became one of the few Black photographers to document the student protests of May 1968.

Back in Abidjan in 1970, he founded MAMEDIS, an all-purpose agency practicing photography, film, and publishing alike. As early as 1971, he published his first photo-novels in the weekly magazine Ivoire Dimanche, melodramatic serials that shaped a visual education in romance, Ivorian-style. He then turned his camera, in the series “Les Soirées Dansantes,” to the nights of Abidjan.

Thirty thousand negatives nearly fell prey to moths and damp, forgotten at the bottom of a trunk until Kodjo entrusted them, in 2008, to photographer Ananias Léki Dago. “I’ve never heard of another African who saved another African’s archives,” Léki Dago later said. The work continues today with a preservation program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Co-produced with the Palais de Tokyo, the exhibition offers the artist, who died in 2021, his very first solo show in France.

Paul Kodjo, Lost and Found, 1973. Courtesy of Les Rencontres du Sud and in camera galerie.

Paul Kodjo, Our Child Saved Our Love, 1971. Courtesy of Les Rencontres du Sud and in camera galerie.

A few streets away, at the Église des Trinitaires, an opposite gesture is at work: Sammy Baloji reopens his own family’s archive. “Landscape Lens: A Katangese Crossing” centers on the Hôtel Impala, a property that belonged to his great-uncle in Kolwezi, requisitioned twice during the Katanga secession. The inquiry began in 2017, when the artist set out with anthropologist Filip De Boeck to retrace this episode, his own family history as its backdrop.

Against Western archives, often drawn from Paris Match, Baloji sets family testimonies and contemporary mining landscapes, a stratification that the exhibition’s text compares to the termite mounds of Katanga. Not far away, at the Église Saint-Blaise, another newsstand occupies Katia Kameli: every morning for thirty years, the Azzoug family has set up its mobile stall of old postcards on Rue Larbi Ben M’Hidi, in Algiers. She films it in “The Algerian Novel (A New Chapter),” an inquiry begun in 2016 into the making of national narratives.

The walk continues at the Salle Henri Comte, where Thato Toeba brings this leg of the route to a close with an art of collage with “Anyone Can Be Lucifer.” An artist, researcher, and lawyer trained in Berlin, and a native of Maseru, Lesotho, Thato Toeba cuts up and reassembles colonial archives from Southern Africa, making them say, at last, something else.

For the final stop, one must leave the city walls and reach the Abbaye de Montmajour, where Ayana V. Jackson closes the route by restaging horsewomen erased from History, such as Selika Lazevski, the Black equestrienne who made her mark on nineteenth-century France, alongside the Adelitas of the Mexican Revolution.

The exhibition’s unwieldy and prophetic title, “The Good News is Delivered not on Mountaintops but in Clearings,” sets the tone: one must move away from the stories told by victors to go looking, in the clearings, for other lives of women who defied the conventions of their time, riding sidesaddle or astride, on their way to their own emancipations.

Follow the “Indépendances” Route

• “Ghana! Dreaming of Independence 1957-1976” — Palais de l’Archevêché.

• “Paul Kodjo: Photoromance” — La Croisière.

• “Landscape Lens: A Katangese Crossing” — Sammy Baloji, Église des Trinitaires.

• “The Algerian Novel (A New Chapter)” — Katia Kameli, Église Saint-Blaise.

• “Everyone Can Be Lucifer” — Thato Toeba, Salle Henri Comte.

• “The Good News is Delivered not on Mountaintops but in Clearings” — Ayana V. Jackson, Abbaye de Montmajour.