six New Hampshire photographers capture images and new understanding in Ghana

In 1984, Peter Randall traveled to Ghana as a photographer for the United Nations. His mission was to document a new method of smoking fish, using brick ovens and large rectangular screens instead of discarded oil barrels and thin sticks. Twenty-two years later, Randall returned to Ghana and found the same smoking contraption still being used to preserve fish. But it was one of few similarities Randall found in a country that appeared much different in 2006 than it did in 1984. A sleek new airport welcomed Randall and five other New Hampshire photographers upon arrival. The roads leading into the capital city of Accra were drastically improved, and colorful billboards advertised cell phone service and Guinness Draught.

The group set out to follow in the footsteps of famed photographer Paul Strand, who spent six months documenting Ghana’s early experiences after it gained independence from Great Britain in 1957. Strand was a master photographer who had been invited to Ghana by then-president and de facto liberator Kwame Nkrumah. Randall hoped to update Strand’s book, “Ghana: An African Portrait,” and illustrate what had changed in the intervening years. “It’s an inexhaustible world. And I would say that very little of it so far has been photographed,” Strand told Aperture Magazine in 1971. “People have made photographs here and almost everywhere in the world. But they certainly have not photographed with any degree of finality and completion.”

Traveling to Ghana in 2006, Randall, Barbara Bickford, Charter Weeks, Nancy Grace Horton, Gary Samson and Tim Gaudreau wanted to create a contemporary portrait of the tropical West African country. The images they captured are collected in “Ghana: An African Portrait Revisited,” which hits bookstores in June. In an effort to replicate an aspect of Strand’s original book, Randal paired poems with many of the photographs in the book.

Some of the photographs will be on display throughout the summer at the Seacoast African American Cultural Center, housed in the Connie Bean Community Center. With the exhibit, which runs from June 2 through Sept. 1, Randall hopes to “add to the awareness that we already have about the black heritage we have in this area. It’s one thing to think about that. It’s another thing to think about: here is where a lot of these people came from,” he said. In 2005, Portsmouth became a “sister city” to two towns on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. A flurry of cultural exchanges have followed, which Randall hopes will continue into the future. “We want to really stimulate an exchange between our sister cities and communities,” he said.

Randall originally wanted to do the book by himself, but decided a solo project would be too difficult. He had previously traveled to Guatemala with Gary Samson, and he and Charter Weeks had been at UNH at the same time. He knew the rest of the photographers through his work in publishing and photography. Randall said he wanted to recruit photographers who had experience working in developing countries. “It’s one thing to photograph in England or France. It’s another thing to photograph in Cambodia or Ghana,” he said. 

Photographing foreign countries entails a number of logistical challenges. Randall estimates that he spent more money on transportation within Ghana than he did on airfare getting to Africa. Finding contacts also proved difficult. For example, the group was not able to visit an AIDS clinic for lack of a contact. Buying film also presented a challenge for one of the photographers on Randall’s trip; the others all used digital cameras, which made life a lot easier, Randall said. Fortunately, the group did not have to worry about hostility from the locals. “The Ghanian people are very friendly. There are almost no people who are unfriendly,” Randall said. 

But there were ethical challenges to consider. “There’s a constant debate about photographing people in foreign countries. Do you sneak the photographs? Do you confront the people? Sometimes if you confront the people, you lose that moment that you really wanted. There is a certain amount of sensitivity that you really need to acquire to do this,” Randall said. Imagine, he said, a busload of Ghanaians arriving in Portsmouth and photographing random residents while they barbecued or mowed their lawns.

“One of the cardinal rules is you never give the kids money, because the kids will think, ‘I don’t have to go to school. I can just pose because I’m a cute little kid and people will give me money,’” Randall said.

Although the content of each photo is different, there are several themes that thread their way throughout the book. Each photo offers a different lesson on contemporary Ghanaian society. Randall included many portraits of prominent professionals. “We were trying to follow along with what Paul Strand did in his book, and he did a lot of portraits. And so that’s what most of us were working on,” he said. Images of college professors, doctors, dentists, a judge and several others reveal one sector of Ghana’s population with high levels of education. Unfortunately, according to Randall, many educated Ghanaians are moving to Europe or the USA in search of higher-paying jobs, thus depriving Ghana of their expertise.

Technology and industrial development can be seen in many of the photographs. High-rise buildings and looming cooling towers reveal the physical growth of cities. One image shows a vast modern port where helmeted workers offload giant tankers. White sacks labeled with the letters U.S.A. sit in heaps. The caption informs readers that Ghana is importing rice for neighboring Burkina Faso. The picture offers a subtle commentary on Ghana’s economy, which is still heavily dependent on foreign products.

The importance of natural resources is revealed in images of people casting fishing lines, mending nets, building boats and smoking fish. An image of the Akosombo dam reveals a beautiful landscape pocked by this industrial implement, which provides electricity to neighboring Togo, Benin and Cote d’Ivoire. The images of the Ghanaian countryside lack the typical romanticism so often found in pictures of rural Africa. Although many of the images are breathtaking, they also show people interacting with the environment and the resultant degradation of the natural world that often results from such activity.

As an early epicenter of the slave trade, Ghana experienced the cruelty of European colonialism perhaps longer than most other African countries. But as the first sub-Saharan country to gain independence, it set an example for subsequent freedom struggles in places like Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa. “There are many ways of being witness to memory and history, some of them carried out in solitude, others public and monumental, and the camera’s eye is a witness to both,” Busia writes. Judging from the images in Randall’s book, Ghana has incorporated this history and its traditional culture with aspects of modern society. One image shows a small girl posed between a woman wearing traditional clothing and another carrying a Western looking purse. 

Education features prominently in many of the photos. Randall spent time speaking with faculty from prominent educational institutions, but there are also images from public schools, which show sparse classrooms filled with uniformed children. Girls and young women are in equal attendance to male students in the public schools and universities—a newer phenomenon, according to Randall. In his 1984 trip, Ghanaian women had received little formal education.

Ghana’s flag is composed of three different colors: red, green and gold. The gold signifies mineral wealth, green represents the lush vegetation and red is meant to commemorate the blood that was spilled and the lives that were lost during Ghana’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. A five-pointed black star in the middle of the flag symbolizes African emancipation and unity in the struggle against colonialism. One of Randall’s favorite photographs from the book is of the woman who designed the original flag. She sits in a chair, wearing traditional clothing and holding a small Ghanaian flag. “I really like the old lady with the flag,” Randall said. “She sort of connects everything with the past, 50 years ago, so I just like that photograph. But I look at the book more like a body of work, rather than one iconic image.”