James Barnor was born in Accra, in what was then the Gold Coast, West Africa. Explaining how he came to choose his career he has said: "Photography was in my family. My two uncles were photographers. My cousin was a photographer, and I found out later when I got into it that another cousin was also a photographer."
 
In 1947, Barnor was apprenticed for two years to his cousin J. P. Dodoo, a well-known portrait photographer and after finishing the apprenticeship set up his own freelance photographic practice in a makeshift street studio in the Jamestown area of the capital, using a backdrop outside his rented room.
 
When his landlord wanted to reclaim the room, from 1953 Barnor began to operate his Ever Young Studio.^[6] Its name derives from the subject of an English comprehension extract he had studied as a schoolboy, entitled "Iduna's Grove", about a Norse goddess giving out magic apples to grant eternal youthfulness; it was also an allusion to the expected practice of retouching sitters' faces to perfection - "Long before Photoshop existed you would use a pencil. I would retouch the pictures to make people look younger."
 
 Located close to the once-famous Seaview Hotel, the studio "soon drew a mixture of clients from families to night revellers and dignitaries". Among those whom Barnor photographed were Ghana's future first presidentKwame Nkrumah, pan-Africanist politician J. B. Danquah, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke (last British governor of the Gold Coast), the Duchess of Kent and then American Vice-PresidentRichard Nixon (when he attended Ghana's Independence ceremony in March 1957).
At the same time as freelancing, Barnor became the first staff photographer employed by the Daily Graphic newspaper when it was established in Ghana in 1950 by Cecil King of the London Daily Mirror Group. Barnor also sold photographs to other publications, notably the South African magazine Drum, with whom he established an ongoing relationship.
 
In December 1959 he travelled to England to develop his skills, working at Colour Processing Laboratories Ltd, Edenbridge, Kent, and attending evening and other part-time classes before being awarded a Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board scholarship to study full-time at Medway College of Art in Rochester, Kent. Subsequent to this course, he continued working as a photographer and technician, before in 1969 going back to Ghana, where he set up the country's first colour processing facilities.
 
For the following 24 years he worked as a professional photographer, was the official African representative for Agfa-Gevaert (at the time the leading company for imaging technology), and was also given work by the American embassy and Ghanaian government agencies under the auspices of J. J. Rawlings.
In 1994, Barnor returned to London, where he still lives.
Source - Wikipedia