STRASBURG — Whether he’s wandering the majestic mountains of local national parks or traveling abroad, George Hoffman never leaves home without his camera.

Known for his vivid landscapes as well as macro-detailed shots of bumblebees dancing on flower petals, Hoffman uses his lens to reveal details about locations and objects that others might overlook.

“I’m an artist,” Hoffman said. “In the sense of two-dimensional stuff. I like to draw, to paint. I’ve made jewelry. But photography — for me, at least at this point in my life — it’s what I enjoy most of all.”

Hoffman, who also likes to sing, garden and sew, frequently seeks new creative outlets to fill his time after his recent retirement. He also gives back to his local arts community. With a simple point a click camera, Hoffman — who prefers something light and easy to work with — never misses an opportunity to stop for a photo.

“I need to create,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.”

Nature is Hoffman’s biggest inspiration. As the sun wakes up Strasburg, he is often already outside capturing the sunrise and its soft hues of pinks, oranges and blues. When the moon is at its fullest, he patiently waits for clouds to pass to capture the Man in the Moon. When he sees a fawn impatiently waiting on its mother, he snaps the special moment. If he sees a flower he’s unfamiliar with, he’ll note its location and capture its essence.

“I’m also interested in plants and their biology,” he explained. “I like to photograph plants — I do a lot of flowers. We’ve gotten lucky here recently, as I’ve noticed more mushrooms on our walks.”

Hoffman also photographs wildlife, including the occasional animal he might see walking along the river banks or the bird in the front yard. But his Facebook feed, where he shares his most recent images, isn’t all animals and foliage. Occasionally Hoffman, who likes to cook, will share an image he captured of his dinner, reminiscing on the good-old days — when social media was used for just that. He also shares intimate details, behind the lens of his own life including the most recent addition to the family, his grandson.

“Digital cameras just opened up the world to a creative person. You can take pictures of something from 27 different angles and throw 26 of them away if you want.”

Hoffman said today’s technology is far advanced from the beginning of his photography journey, which started with a 35-millimeter camera. 

“There’s hardly any comparison,” he said with a chuckle. “Those old pictures were just so rudimentary.”

“I didn’t have access to the development stuff,” he said. “And I didn’t have the money to pay for it. So I happened to find a place that would develop my photographs the best and I would say a prayer and hope they did okay.”

Hoffman said he enjoys looking back on his old work and seeing not only how he’s grown as a photographer but the changes in technology. Just in the past 20 years, the photography industry has witnessed major developments in camera technology. 

Sharing a recent cell phone photo he took, Hoffman confessed it doesn’t get much better than that. Using a photo editor on his phone, he sometimes retouches minor details and may increase the saturation, but typically he just places his name on the photo to prevent theft and then shares it on social media for his fans and followers.

As part of a local Facebook photography group, Hoffman shares his inspiration and helps those seeking to better their own images with friendly critiques and words of wisdom. The group has over 100 members with roughly 30 photographers participate on a weekly basis, which keeps the momentum going for all, he said. Each week the group is given a theme — such as dinner — and then they capture their story and discuss it at a later date. 

Hoffman has enjoyed various jobs before retirement, including teaching photography at Shenandoah University, and has fond memories of his students. At SU, he taught students how to compose photographs and how to apply their knowledge to creating their own two-dimensional artwork.

“We used some of the tried-and true-things that would guide them in taking good photographs and then they would go out for two weeks, take their own photographs and turn them into me. Their favorite ones. We would come together as a class and do critiques and discuss why they were good or not.”

He also participated in the college’s Global Experiential Learning trip and visited orphans in Ethiopia with students, which he said was an eye-opening experience. He returned home with a series of portraits he still talks about to this day.

“They still, when I look at them, they just grab me.”

Sitting in his basement are many of his 35 mm images — developed and framed along with his more recent works — including the faces of the Ethiopian children. 

Hoffman hopes to take more international trips with his wife, seeing what the world holds for his camera. His wife, who he said complements him well, sometimes takes in the beauty around her with her own camera. Hoffman said the couple then sit down and see what the other saw.

“Honestly, it all started with just recording memories,” he said. “Now I have that combination of recording memories and the feeling of creating a nice or cool picture at the same time. You know, when I was younger, I didn’t really pay attention to the aesthetics of it. But over the years that’s been equally as important to me to create that sense of nostalgia.”

When travel photography is successful, it should feel like an invitation—to a place, an adventure, a fantasy—a preview of a memory you want to capture for yourself. It toes a delicate line between intimacy and escapism, something otherworldly yet attainable. As a photographer for Condé Nast Traveller, in addition to several other publications, New York-based photographer Julien Capmeil has honed this artful balance over his decades-long career.

Having grown up with a penchant for nature photography inspired by his “mad professor-type” father’s underwater photos of the Barrier Reef, Capmeil pursued his passion in a series of apprenticeships in Sydney, Paris, and New York. Inspired by greats such as Herb Ritts and Irving Penn, he developed a deft sense of composition and storytelling within his body of work. Now, as an established travel photographer with thrilling anecdotes of his adventures, Capmeil discusses his art practice, advice for aspiring photographers, and how he maintains a sense of playfulness in his work.

Anguilla

Photo: Julien Capmeil

Aspen

Photo: Julien Capmeil

Weligama

Photo: Julien Capmeil

Sri Lanka

Photo: Julien Capmeil

Pricing is one of the trickiest aspects of being a professional photographer, and there are no hard and fast rules on how to go about setting yours to ensure you bring in the most income from your work. Nonetheless, there are some important principles every photographer should understand. This helpful video tutorial features an experienced pro discusses two common pricing mistakes photographers make and how to fix them. 

Coming to you from Keith Cooper, this great video tutorial discusses two common pricing mistakes photographers often make. As Cooper discusses, offering big discounts to get clients in the door will often not have the effect you want it to, as you will have established an unsustainable price level with those clients, and once you try to raise the prices back to a more reasonable place, they will often simply leave you for the next bargain photographer. It is much better to have a few clients from whom you make a good income than many clients from whom you only make a little each. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Cooper.

If you would like to learn more about the business of photography, check out “Making Real Money: The Business of Commercial Photography With Monte Isom!”

The sea lies motionless, radiant as a mirror, beneath a voluminous night sky. It holds the same moonlight our ancestors once saw, thousands of years ago. Two horizontal expanses of glowing light and dark, this mesmerising photograph gives no hint of when or even where in this world we might be. It is concerned with the very opposite: the timeless sky, the unchanging ocean.

The great Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948) is probably most famous for his long series of luminous seascapes, begun in 1980 and generally made at first or last light with an immense box camera set up on a cliff looking out to the horizon. In this case, according to the caption, he was off the north Atlantic coast. These monochrome photographs must all be captured at a particular moment, by their very nature, and yet they appear to stand outside time. Their poetry lies in more than they show.

It is astonishing that the Hayward Gallery’s magnificent retrospective, Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine, is the artist’s first in Britain. For decades he has been taking celebrated pictures that make us think of the nature of picture-taking – seascapes, for instance, that hover between representation and abstraction.

There are visions of shining light where up and down appear inscrutable, seas that tip over the horizon, or resemble nothing but haar. There are seas that register as oblongs of graphite shading. All are real – look closely and you can even distinguish tidal flow – but as intangible as outer space.

During the processing, Sugimoto found that static electricity interfered with the results. Using a Van de Graaff generator to release electrical charges on to photosensitive paper, he began to reproduce this accident to his advantage. The Hayward has a gallery full of the subsequent Lightning Fields series.

Forked lightning hits the ground, or rises up like a standing tree, brilliant white against the night. It splinters into veins, in turn conjuring human X-rays, winter leaves or silver deposits. It flashes like flames or fireflies, which might be vast or in minute closeup, since there is no measure of scale. These split-second images describe both the action of electricity and the essence of photography: light captured and magically held.

The show opens with some of Sugimoto’s earliest and most bewildering photographs. These appear to show wolves in intimate groupings, or condors alighting on high mountain peaks. A polar bear looks down upon a dead seal, ice and freezing air stretching away into the whiteout.

How can Sugimoto be present? Where is the here of these photographs, and when? Logic says they cannot quite be real, and yet that is precisely what they seem. In fact the artist was taking large-format, long-exposure photographs of prehistoric dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was picturing tableaux, effectively, while apparently bringing the taxidermied creatures back to life. Though the bear is now twice removed from its homeland, it seems to be released from time’s ice, returning to reality.

“There is no decisive moment in my photograph,” Sugimoto has said, “only the melting of time.” What would you see, for instance, if you captured a whole film in a single frame? Sugimoto has returned to this question over and again since the early 70s, each time in the poetic atmosphere of some abandoned cinema. He opens the camera’s aperture at the start of the movie and only closes it at the end. The screen turns into an oblong of pure incandescence, illuminating the more or less grand decay of the theatre around it.

People in the gallery look to see if the image is backlit on a lightbox; how else to explain the almost supernatural brightness? In one sense, the Hayward show is all ceaseless mystery and surprise. Take the gallery of portraits. Even if it is palpably obvious that you cannot be looking at a living Oscar Wilde, or an undead Henry VIII, kingly face like thunder, there is a momentary swither (as with practically everything Sugimoto makes) between illusion and reality.

Perhaps someone is acting the part of Diana, Princess of Wales for Sugimoto, in the manner of some Alison Jackson fake celebrity setup? This woman is so much more like Diana than any professional lookalike; and yet somehow not quite herself. Sugimoto is in fact photographing her waxwork, in such voluminous shadow, and with such glamorous lighting, that she appears to be right there before us. There are no real people in his photographs.

Sugimoto has written of learning how to see the world as the camera does. But of course it can only record what he himself selects – seas and skies, dawn and electricity, even the colour of light itself, in a very moving late gallery, where the images seem to slip the bonds of Earth for the high empyrean.

Most captivating of all are the photographs where the camera seems to be drifting somewhere in the air, as if in a dream. The Seagram Building becomes a grey ghost at dusk. The sea is a silver continuum. The pinnacle of the Chrysler Building is recognisably itself, yet so sequined and twinkling in the light of another sun it seems to exist in some other era.

This is a beautiful, enthralling and meditative show, the atmosphere at the Hayward gently transfixed, audiences quietly talking. Wonder is at the heart of it: a wonder at nature, man and creature, all through time, but also at the strangeness of photography itself. For these are pictures of what photographs may also be – the half-caught memory, the ghost in the machine, the shadow in time’s eye.

Philosophers speak of the metaphysical in Sugimoto’s art and that seems apt. Some of his images make truth out of fiction through the camera’s seal of authenticity; others unmoor our sense of place and time. Records made in and of time, these images nonetheless float free of their given moment, showing us what the world looked like before we existed, as it seems, and perhaps even what it will look like when we are no longer there.

As early as December, East Texas will have its first community darkroom since the pitch-black spaces for developing film all but disappeared with the advent of digital cameras.

Film shooters can thank Longview photographer and Piney Woods Darkroom founder Jamie Maldonado when the 1,500-square-foot building opens at 231 S. College Ave. in Tyler. And Maldonado can thank film photography’s resurgence, which shows no signs of slowing down.

The space will contain facilities for photo printing, framing, film development and retail, along with a photo book library and room for classes. Maldonado said he anticipates the retail portion to open sometime before the end of the year, depending on donations.

“It’s extremely exciting,” he said. Doubly so after the trials and tribulations that led him to found the nonprofit darkroom in the first place.

‘I have a dream. Can you help me?’

In quick succession during the pandemic, Maldonado lost his photography job at Kilgore College and then his mother to cancer.

“I asked myself, ‘What do I do now’?”

He took a trip to Joshua Tree, California, where his friend operated a community darkroom.

“ ‘I wish I could do that,’ ” Maldonado said he remembers thinking.

Around the same time, he was developing film for friends in East Texas and watched demand for his services climb.

“I started seeing more and more people shooting film, too,” Maldonado said. Gen-Z celebrities such as Zendaya began snapping photos with 20-year-old cameras. What’s old was new again.

“And the more I thought about a darkroom, the more it made sense,” he said, “so I started drafting a business plan in 2022. I began with my initial fundraising early this year basically saying, ‘I have this dream, can you help me’?”

He raised almost $6,000 while operating from a provisional office at Work Smart in Longview.

Film for the people

One consequence of the prevailing retromania propelling analog camera and film sales is that the costs that go along with them have shot through the roof. Entry-level cameras that once were bargain bin grabs are fetching luxury prices. The cost of popular film stocks has climbed year by year.

Maldonado has little interest in cashing out on the analog trend.

“Everything I sell, all the services I provide, will be tied directly back to the mission of the darkroom,” he said. “Our mission is to provide access and educational value to the community.”

He plans to sell rolls of film as close as possible to the price of purchase and rent out starter cameras like those that many college students receive in photography programs.

The more donations that come in, the lower Maldonado can keep prices, he said.

Affordability is one challenge with film photography. Access to services is another, he said.

“People don’t get stuff like this around here. It’s typically for those living in big cities and with a lot of money.”

The closest community darkroom offering low-price, hands-on facilities for photographers is in Dallas. Heading east, the nearest option is in Memphis.

Maldonado aims to bring those resources to the Piney Woods Darkroom.

“Being in Tyler, It’s close enough that people in Longview can take advantage of it and still be close enough that people in Shreveport can come, too,” he said. “Accessibility is so important to me.”

Donations can be made to the Piney Woods Darkroom on its website. Donations will help Maldonado complete the build-out of the space and reduce the prices of film products and services, he said.

It’s no secret that one of the best stargazing spots in Southern California is Joshua Tree National Park. The park is an International Dark Sky Place — meaning that aside from some light pollution coming from Palm Springs and the Morongo Basin, it has some of the darkest skies in the region — and it’s just a two- or three- hour drive from Los Angeles.

But the best way to see the stars there isn’t with your eyes. It’s with a camera.

“As it gets dark, you’ll see there’s a kind of light, mottled appearance where the Milky Way band is,” said Jon Norris, who has taught photography workshops in the park for four years. “You will be able to perceive the Milky Way, but the image your digital camera will take will be much, much clearer than what your eyes can perceive.”

Norris, a former aerospace engineer turned landscape photographer, teaches some of his dark-sky photography workshops via the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park, a nonprofit cooperating association that provides educational programming for the park.

“We’re here to provide specialized or in-depth opportunities for people to explore the park and understand this resource from a more specialized perspective,” said Sarah Witt, Desert Institute program director of Desert Institute.

The educational programs can range from school trips to field classes on local insects, flora and fauna. And though the institute has offered classes and workshops for 24 years, Witt said it’s now trying to provide more short-form, entry-level activities for people to engage with.

“When we come to a desert, we want to do everything,” Witt said. “You know, we want to get our chakras cleansed, and we want to go to Pappy &Harriet’s and wear cowboy boots. We don’t want to go bird-watching for two days, necessarily, right? But we do want to educate people on birds!”

Relative to some of the multi-day programs that the Desert Institute offers, these dark-sky photography workshops are pretty low commitment. During my six-hour class, I took hundreds of photos in the same amount of time that my partner had a rack of ribs and watched a Grateful Shred show at Pappy &Harriet’s in nearby Pioneertown.

Astrophotography workshops are usually scheduled around the new moon — when the sky is darkest — during the Milky Way season, which is February to October in the Northern Hemisphere. So just two days after September’s new moon, I found myself fumbling with a camera in a pitch-black field of Yucca brevifolia, trying to capture a few decent photos for this story.

Want to take your own photos of the night sky? Here are some night photography tips and tricks from Norris.

Get set up while there’s still light out

By 5:30 p.m., our class of five was gathered in the Cap Rock parking lot — one of the lots that stays open at night for stargazers. After Norris and a park volunteer named Chris checked our names and waivers, we got straight to work on our cameras.

Participants must bring a DSLR or a mirrorless camera that they’re familiar with, but Norris helped each of us set our focus, aperture, exposure and ISO manually to prepare for shooting in the dark.

“What we’re trying to do is capture an image of a very dark scene, and the most important thing in that scene is the stars,” Norris said. “We want the stars to be absolutely pin sharp, so one of the things we need to do before it gets dark is we’re going to set up our focus on something at infinity.”

Once we all managed to focus on a mountain in the distance and finished tinkering with our various camera settings and lenses, Norris taped our focal rings to keep them in place throughout the night, since it’s “impossible” to focus properly in the dark. He helped us set delays (so pressing the shutter button wouldn’t shake the cameras at the beginning of our shots), and instructed us to shoot in RAW — rather than JPEG — since RAW images capture the highest level of detail.

After a reminder to bring water and a rundown of Cap Rock Trail, which is a 0.4-mile loop with a bathroom near the parking lot, Norris led us onto the trail to start planning our shots.

Don’t be afraid
of technology

“With a dark-sky photo, preferably, you want to have an interesting foreground, because it helps give it scale and makes the image look more interesting,” Norris said as we left the parking lot. “So we’re going to spend the next hour or so wandering around this trail, looking for different compositions.”

To plan his shots, Norris swears by a phone app called PhotoPills, which allows him to figure out shot compositions ahead of time with the help of nighttime augmented reality. The app also tracks the moon phases and daily timing of moonrise, moonset and galactic center visibility.

PhotoPills works without wifi, so we were able to see where the Milky Way would be at every minute between 8:14 and 11:22 p.m. (when the galactic center was visible that night).

The app also has a photography calculator labeled “spot stars,” which allows you to input your camera model, which millimeter you want to shoot at and your widest aperture to calculate the optimal shutter speed for your camera. That leaves the camera’s ISO as the only guesswork — Norris recommends starting with 1600 and toggling up or down (to 3200 or 800) as you begin shooting.

In terms of composition, Norris suggested that each of us include at least one tree above the ridgeline, so the silhouette can contrast the night sky. When each of us found a shot that we liked, we were able to screenshot the composition on PhotoPills and drop a pin on our maps app to return to the same spot later.

“Well, I mean, knowing where is only half the battle,” Norris said. “It’s still plenty hard enough to get a decent shot.”

Let your
creativity run wild

Though the camera settings may be similar for most astrophotographers, there are countless ways to take different photos of the same stars.

Norris likes to keep his images fairly accurate to what he captures in real life, but some photographers incorporate surreal light painting (another class recently offered by the Desert Institute) and other artistic effects.

Lucy Delaney, a biology professor at UC Riverside, was hoping to take a few self-portraits with the stars during our workshop. As we moved around and experimented with different ISO values, she realized that people’s red headlamps and flashlights could make the foreground bright enough to light up her face (and the surrounding Joshua trees) in a portrait.

Norris explained that it’s also common for photographers to blend multiple images together to reduce noise from passing planes and car headlights. Stacking multiple photos can also make the landscape look a bit more interesting — for example, images where you’re able to see more detail than just a dark silhouette in the foreground are likely composites.

“They’ll take images of the foreground at the end of twilight so you can still see some definition — so you could see bushes, you could see some of these other trees, you can see the ridgeline,” Norris said. “Then they’ll wait two or three hours and then take the Milky Way picture without moving the tripod.”

Follow the star trails

The latter half of Norris’ workshop involved setting up our cameras in a stationary spot to take hundreds of shots over the course of about an hour. If your camera doesn’t have one built in, he recommends bringing an intervalometer to automatically take time-lapse photos.

Using PhotoPills, we were also able to see what paths the star trails would be moving along.

“With star trails, there’s a couple of different options you’ve got,” Norris said. “So you can find a composition where Polaris is in the shot, and you’ll get concentric rings, or if you move 90 degrees left or right to the pole star, then there’s a diagonal line that’s called the celestial equator.”

And though it makes sense to assume that the stars are in motion, these trails actually show us how the planet is moving.

“The stars aren’t moving, we are,” Norris said. “It’s a bit of a mind melt. You’re basically taking pictures as the Earth spins, but the impression it gives us is that the stars are moving.”

Norris usually takes about 200 photos in the same spot that he later cleans up — “because every fifth shot, I guarantee you, you’re gonna have aircraft lights,” he said. He then exports them as TIFF files, to make sure they don’t lose any data, and uploads them to an application called Starry Sky Stacker, which combines all the photos to build the actual star trails.

Working on different projects throughout the night also allowed us to learn a bit more about photography faux pas that amateurs typically make.

“I always just leave the shutter open, how come no one does that?” Sung-Ho Tsai, an engineer taking the class, asked earlier in the evening.

“You basically want to have the shutter speed as short as you can get away with, but capturing enough light,” Norris explained. “The good thing about doing shorts is you get less digital noise, but also if some Bozo walks through your shop with a headlamp on — which will happen — it only ruins one 15-second shot, and you can throw it away, and it doesn’t affect the rest of your your final star trail.”

Because I didn’t have an intervalometer, I manually took a photo every 20 seconds for an hour. It was certainly more work than if my camera could space shots out on its own, but at least I had good company.

As we killed an hour taking photos for our respective star trails, the class sat on one big rock, chitchatting about airplanes, aliens and long-distance relationships.

Our conversation was occasionally interrupted by one of us spotting a shooting star, which the rest of the group quickly tried to find in the vast darkness.

“You can’t really find them — they’ll find us,” Norris said as we scoured the star-filled sky for more wishes. “You just have to be looking.”

Genesee Drone Productions, LLC., is a company that specializes in unmanned aerial vehicle — or drone — photography and videography.

Tim Rigdon, the owner, is originally from Virginia but moved to Genesee County to be closer to his wife’s family. As a respiratory therapist, he works in the healthcare field, but he needed an alternative outlet and found that through flying drones.

Tim has always been fascinated with flying, but operating a small plane is not currently an option for him. Purchasing a drone has allowed him to fulfill his desire to fly and take photos and videos from a bird’s eye view.

Starting a drone photography and videography business can be challenging, but Rigdon saw an opportunity in his local area. Upon speaking with family and friends, he realized there were few UAV photographers/videographers in the area, and this is how Genesee Drone Productions, LLC came to be. Although it has only been operating for less than a year, Rigdon has already had some memorable experiences. He is grateful to the customers who have allowed him to work with them and recognizes them as some of his firsts.

For those who are just starting to use a drone, Rigdon’s advice is to have fun with it and to take classes either in person or online to learn how to properly and safely operate it. Earning your UAV pilot license part 107 is also important.

Genesee Drone Productions, LLC offers a variety of services, including commercial real estate photos and videos editing, residential landscape photography and editing, photos for sale, agricultural mapping, and topography mapping.

Genesee Drone Productions, LLC is a company that offers high-quality UAV photography and videography services. Tim’s passion for flying and his desire to capture images from a bird’s eye view have led him to start this business, and he is excited to continue providing his services to clients in the Genesee County area.

For more information, email geneseedroneproductions@gmail.com or find the business on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100090932206873.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is adapted from a “Member Spotlight” blog post from the Genesee County Chamber of Commerce.

There are piles of photographs dotted all around James Barnor’s modest west London retirement flat: on bookshelves, in drawers, behind his radio, too. Negatives and contact sheets are laid out on the window sill; bigger prints are stored somewhere beyond his front door, in a cupboard into which he keeps disappearing. “If we’re going to do this,” he’d said after greeting me, followed by a long, deep laugh, “we have to do it properly. Get comfortable – I don’t want us to miss anything.” And we don’t, not that I’ve got any complaints: I’ve barely noticed the light outside fading.

It’s now late afternoon on a grey October Monday – the 94-year-old firmly into leading his fourth hour of free-flowing, life-spanning conversation. Sitting squarely opposite me, barefoot in his bright green patterned shirt and copper three-quarter lengths, Barnor is holding court in a way that few can: with charm, charisma, some cheekiness, and a never-ending reserve of fascinating stories. For what must be the 20th time this afternoon, he’s jumping up from where we’re sitting with boundless energy to grab another print from somewhere behind me. Being a photographer whose work covers almost eight decades, he has quite the back catalogue to pick from. “I did mean it,” he says, beaming, while settling back down, “when I said I had a photograph for everything. I need you to look at this picture I took of Muhammad Ali in the 1960s…”

There’s a computer on one of his two sitting room desks. On it, Barnor has recently – with the help of his Paris-based manager – started the mammoth task of digitally archiving his sprawling collection of pictures. Images taken in Ghana, where he was born and raised, and England, from the 1940s to today: lifestyle, politics, fashion; commercial and editorial. “The software was only downloaded last week,” he explains, “I might be 90-something, but I can do this digital whatever.” Much of the physical archive has been taken to France to be processed. Barnor, from the comfort of his chair, can slowly work through identifying each picture. “It’s strange. My manager is French. They colonised my continent, and took all our gold. Now I’ve sent them my treasures!” It’s a major task to undertake, but for Barnor it is thrilling. “To archive my work like this? It makes me a different class of photographer. And the fact I can look at each picture even now and work out where I was? The story behind it? It might take some thinking, but it’s all up there.” He taps his temple. “It’s just one reason why they call me Lucky Jim.”

Barnor counts himself a lucky man, with anecdotes to back this up across continents and decades. His latest bout of good fortune, he believes, has been one of the greatest yet: despite his long and illustrious career, it’s only fairly recently his work has achieved more widespread recognition. A recent major retrospective at London’s Serpentine Gallery has been followed by exhibitions in Switzerland, the US, and, later this month, Antwerp. Multiple books have come out in the past few years to celebrate his pictures. The latest, published by Thames & Hudson, is the reason for our meeting. His work can be found in the Tate’s and Victoria and Albert Museum’s permanent collections. His newfound fans include the likes of Anthony Vaccarello, creative director of Yves Saint Laurent and the Swiss art curator and critic, Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Barnor met Naomi Campbell at his exhibition at the Nubuke Foundation gallery in Accra. “James is a beautiful, creative and humble man,” Campbell tells me, “his groundbreaking work as a photojournalist and Black lifestyle photographer spans 60 years. As well as capturing social and political changes, his timeless images seem to capture the very soul of his subjects. He reminds us that African history is just as significant as that of Europe or anywhere else.” American photographer Tyler Mitchell agrees. “James Barnor’s work has greatly inspired my own,” he says. “In a conversation we had he called himself the ‘bridge’ of the medium of photography between the older and the newer generation. That is to say, Barnor is one of the pioneers of how we today understand contemporary photography.” They’re two of many to offer him the highest of praises.

Well into his 70s, however, Barnor was to most something of an unknown entity. When he moved to London from the Ghanaian capital in 1994, his future looked very different. “I was already 65 when I came to London,” he says, “just hoping to be able to make ends meet. Things weren’t going right for me in Ghana.” Despite having had a long, fairly successful career in photography, the prospect of spending his later years in Accra seemed difficult. “I had nothing to show for anything I’d done, and the economy was going down in Ghana. On arriving, he lived with friends for a while. In 1996, he moved into the flat he still lives in today.

Despite being at retirement age when arriving in London, finding work wasn’t a choice, but a question of survival. “So I started as a cleaner. A friend of mine taught me the ropes. I started off in a college in Richmond, and then mostly worked at Heathrow, in Terminal 3.” There’s not a corner of that place he doesn’t still know intimately. “Nobody knew about my work,” he says, “and I had to forget about it, too. To dwell on it would have made me so frustrated. Plus, I was just grateful to have somewhere to sleep. But still, I kept taking photos for myself. Of the people who worked at the airport. Occasionally at a dance or a party.” Briefly, it seemed he might set up shop processing film in a nearby unit, but that came to nothing. “I went back to cleaning,” he says, “but eventually I wanted to try to do something with my photography.”

Barnor started to hustle. In 2004, to celebrate his 75th birthday, he organised a small exhibition of his work in nearby Feltham in conjunction with Hounslow Older People’s Services. A trip to the Ghanaian embassy paid off – the high commissioner attended, which helped generate a bit of press attention. “Some reporting on it went on Google,” he says, proudly. “It was the start of people coming to see me and my work. I then went to Toronto to do a show after I told them that if they could accommodate me, I’d go and help them make an exhibition.” With a body of work to back it up, his tenacity, charm and that Barnor luck began to deliver. “In 2007, we celebrated Ghana’s 50th anniversary of independence. The Black Cultural Archives asked to do an exhibition of my work to celebrate.” It was his first major solo show. “From there, we had a big exhibition at a university in America. Then Cape Town. The Midlands. Then a man from Ghana came to meet me here, in this flat, and put on my first exhibition back in Accra. That one felt really special.”

Barnor was born in Accra in 1929. Aged 16, he picked up his first camera. “It was a gift from a crafts teacher of mine,” he says, “a Kodak Baby Brownie”. He points to a shelf, proudly displaying it. For a while, young Barnor imagined he’d become a teacher, too. “But my father couldn’t pay my school fees as I got older, so I couldn’t attend secondary school. Instead, I did an apprenticeship under various cousins of mine. One, JP Dodoo, was a portrait photographer. Another, Julius Atkins, taught me about darkrooms and developing film.” With that, Barnor is up, again, rummaging through a pile of books to dig out family photos.

Newly confident with his own camera, Barnor traversed the streets of Accra to shoot: portraiture, street photography, celebratory gatherings. In the early 1950s, he opened a modest studio in the Jamestown area, a fishing port. “It was called Ever Young: this tiny space. I had a dark room to develop pictures, and it’s also where I slept.” It became a social and community space, where music always played. Here, his portraits captured Ghanaian society in a state of total transition.

With this base, he built up a varied freelance career, one of the country’s first homegrown photojournalists. His work documented the country as it freed itself from British colonial rule, the first African nation to do so: from the Ghanaian capital, he captured political and social upheaval. Working for a local newspaper – the Daily Graphic, and then a photo agency called Black Star, too, he witnessed the independence movement growing. “In 1951, I photographed Kwame Nkrumah being released from prison.” A member of the newly formed Convention People’s party, he’d been elected to government while incarcerated for civil disobedience. In 1957, when Ghana became an independent state, Nkrumah was sworn in as its first prime minister and president. Barnor saw this change first hand. “And I was learning on the job. During independence, the world’s press descended on Ghana. I saw all these photographers with their huge cameras and wanted to learn more. So two years later, I headed to England wanting to study.”

He arrived in London in a wintry December, 1959. He found lodging in Peckham with a Jamaican man. At night, he worked in a factory that made rubber parts for machinery. “I’m Lucky Jim,” he says, “I didn’t see much of the trouble that might have affected Black people. I started to study at the London College of Printing.” Soon, he decided to move to Kent, where he enrolled at Medway College of Art and worked in colour-processing laboratories. Once settled, his wife and a child came to join him.

Back in Ghana, he’d started to work with Drum Magazine: the South African, anti-apartheid and Black lifestyle and political publication which had international distribution. From England, he shot fashion covers with Black models, celebrity portraits, and London’s African diaspora communities – the Black British swinging 60s. In 1969, he headed back to Ghana, where he spent the next 25 or so years working. He introduced colour-processing techniques to the country, before opening his own studio once more. He’s credited as being the first person to shoot Ghana in full colour. In the 1980s, he worked as a photographer for the US embassy, before relocating to London.

Out in the corridor, against its white walls, Barnor has set up an impromptu exhibition for me. As we stand and look, I ask how it feels to – at last – be getting his flowers. There’s a vast smile on his face; his eyes really look to be twinkling. “I carried all my work with me wherever I went,” he says, gesturing around. “I’ve never had a house of my own, not here or in Ghana. So, I’ve lost quite a lot of it on the way. I never had an archive, I just kept my negatives. I thank God for all of it – and I feel very proud,” he continues. “Now I’m getting not just recognition, but a chance to mentor the next generation. I’ve now got a foundation in my name to celebrate and support emerging photographers from across Africa.”

“This is what keeps me going,” he says. “I really should have taken Co-codamol [a painkiller] since you got here, but I’ve not needed to since you arrived. I could keep going all night. My carer forces me to eat: I don’t get pleasure from it. But when it comes to talking to you? To mentoring and showing my photographs? That’s what pleasure is to me.”

There’s one last picture he wants me to look at, this time in a WhatsApp chat on his phone. In it, Barnor is standing in this same corridor surrounded by a group of smiling faces. “This is John Mahama,” says Barnor, “a past president of Ghana. He came here, to this room, to meet me. Just like you. I signed a copy of the book for him. So, you ask me how I feel about all this? I don’t have the words. How could I? I barely got a secondary education. I used to sleep on the floor as a child, as an old man I was a cleaner. Today, I’m doing this interview. Tomorrow, something else wonderful will happen. Like I told you at the start – it’s why they call me Lucky Jim.”

James Barnor, part of the Photofile series, is published by Thames & Hudson. His exhibition, James Barnor, Studio of Life, opens at FOMU, Antwerp, on 27 October

(fomu.be)

The Dutch photographer and artist Viviane Sassen has spoken about her work dramatising her shyness, her anxieties about connecting with the world. In that context, this self-portrait, which prefaces Phosphor, a new book and a large retrospective exhibition of her work, might seem out of character. Not for the exposed body so much as for her eye that gazes at the viewer as she gazes at herself. She took the picture in 1990, when she was 19, studying photography and starting to work as a model – a role that convinced her to follow a vocation on the looking side of the lens. As she once said in an interview with the Observer: “I think that the experience I had of being shot by male photographers shaped what I was attempting to do, to show a different kind of sexuality than that created by the male gaze. One that is more fractured, disjointed. I have always been a very shy exhibitionist. Trying to hide but wanting to show.”

Phosphor features the multiple strategies she has used to explore that contradiction, including masks and mirrors and paint effects and Photoshop. Sassen has worked in fashion, but her photographs have never been the standard issue of the glossies. She has a fascination with the strangeness and eroticism of the body, but rarely with faces. Part of her childhood was spent in Kenya, where her father worked as a doctor, and she has returned to remote places in Africa, and to South America, not so much as a documentarist, but as if to locate the sources of her surrealist take on the world: the child’s eye saturated with colour and troubled by shadow. However far she travels, a good part of her journey is self-discovery – and however abstract her images, they are, she suggests, all really self-portraits. This was only the first of many.