It's great to be young

In connection with the second Parisian exhibition of the photographer James Barnor, the gallery shall bring together an ensemble of prints of varied origins, including a selection of unseen images brought to you further to the archiving of James Barnor’s archives – in collaboration with the photographer – and printed from original negatives on silver-based paper.

In 2015, the gallery Clémentine de la Feronnière showed part of the touring exhibition Ever Young, curated by Renée Mussai (Autograph ABP) and seized the opportunity to published a book. Since then, an intense collaboration with the photographer lead to several major breakthroughs: the acquisition, in 2016, of 70 prints by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris (currently on display in the garden’s cabinets), the production of an exhibition for the Bamako Bienale in 2017 (which ended on January the 31rst 2018), but above all it lead to the launch of the digitizing and organizing of James’s archives, mostly from negatives.

In the exhibition which will take place from February the 15th until March the 31rst, 2018, the gallery proposes to focus on the work of James Barnor as a witness photographer, and to make a careful comparison with a selection of photographs by another contemporary photographer: Marc Riboud. If both men never met, they worked in similar places (here Ghana and England) and over a similar period of time. By going beyond a simple reading of what these iconic images produced by two masters of photography – one from the North, the other from the South – would have left in the history of the medium, we offer a narrative punctuated by visible clues and photographic stories which James Barnor will share with us. This was made possible thanks to David Riboud who, a few years ago, brought to James Barnor a small print of his father. The photo showed the inscription: “It’s great to be young”, a phrase that echoes the name given by James to his studio in the 50’s : the “Ever Young Studio”. The work of these two photographers – beyond their differences – had already crossed path during the 2012 exhibition at the Tate Britain “Another London”.