Gerald 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. 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.
Anna-Forson’s photographic journey reflects Ghana’s diversified political history. Growing up during the decade of independence-era Accra exposed him to the city becoming 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.
In the mid-1970s Anna-Forson 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. When Queen Elizabeth II arrived in Ghana in 1999 on an official visit, the British High Commission called Annan-Forson about photographing the monarch in a private session. Now, Annan-Forson’s first retrospective has arrived Stateside following a run at the Sharjah Art Foundation in collaboration with the Africa Institute in 2022. Curated by Shipley, the show features images that testify to the social and political transformations that shaped Ghana during the late 20th century. Opened earlier this month, the show is now on view at the Howard University Museum in Washington, D.C., where it is being presented by the school’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
