Wacky world of baby names: guess how much mine cost?
Taylor Humphrey can find you a baby name that fits your family’s personal brand, but it might cost you $30,000. That is the top end of what a package with the US-based baby-name consultant costs. Fortunately, she also offers a more accessible option for $350 and, for customers who are willing to share their experience of her service on social media, a $150 discount on any subsequent naming needs. A bargain, really.
Humphrey, who set up her company What’s in a Baby Name in 2015, has helped a number of high-profile (albeit top-secret) clients find the perfect baby name. She’s now taken to TikTok, posting advice, sharing lists and solving baby-name dilemmas for her 70.1k followers. (Sibling for Florence? Tricky, apparently, because the name sits between “high renaissance” and “cutesy vintage”. Humphrey suggests, among others, Daphne for a girl and Arthur for a boy.)
At the upper end of the spectrum, Humphrey caters to celebrities, influencers, professional athletes, politicians and tech executives, among others, who are keen on market research, brand-strategy development, feedback from thinktanks and comprehensive exploration of the family’s values and personal brand to make sure they make the right choice. At $1,500$30,000, clients can expect indepth consultations, a video or storybook telling the story of how “Baby X” got their name, doula support and genealogy reports. For a paltry $350, Humphrey can supply a list of 15 names or feedback on the names you are considering, based on a questionnaire of a client’s preferences, tastes and values.
Humphrey is just one of a number of “baby-name influencers” on the rise across social media. UK-based YouTuber SJ Strum – who offers her consultancy services for free – shares unique baby-name suggestions on both her personal channel and her podcast, Baby Name Envy, while Canada-based Heidi Prunkl, who runs account @babynamesunday, shares weekly name ideas on YouTube and posts carefully curated reels featuring lists on Instagram of names as novel as, well, Novel, all displayed artfully against atmospheric backdrops and set to tinkly muzak. Prunkl also offers bespoke naming services, starting at $60.
All of which leads me to wonder whether society – which used to take name inspiration from family, religion and the monarchy – hasn’t, in fact, lost the plot slightly when it comes to naming babies. After all, it’s not just high- profile celebrities opting for quirky names now: every Tom, Dick, and Harry is, too – me included.
I’ve always loved names, I think, in part, because I love words and the shapes and sounds they make. I have 163 names listed on my phone for a baby that does not yet exist and, thanks to the likes of Humphrey and co, the list is growing. Although I haven’t yet been tempted to fork out thousands for professional help, when, back in 2021, my partner and I chose to name our son Fabian John Cosimo, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been influenced, at least a bit, by social media. Because, while I didn’t find his exact names on Instagram itself – his first name, Fabian, is an ode to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, our left-leaning values and my partner’s love of gardening (the name means broad-bean grower) – I do remember seeing more Balthazars than Benjamins on the accounts I followed and feeling increasingly liberated to make a brave choice. That’s not to say I don’t adore his names, I do. But my partner’s started saying “Fabian” and it’s a curious feeling seeing him wrapping his tongue and lips around a name social media, in a way, nudged me towards. He’s still working on Cosimo.
It seems I’m not alone, though, in wanting my child’s name to stand out. Last month, influencer Imogen Horton made up the name Oriavella for her second daughter. In fairness, Horton has previous, here: her first daughter is named Renaelia, another creation. (Incidentally, Imogen’s own name was invented, albeit accidentally, by William Shakespeare when his character Innogen’s name was misspelled as his tragedy Cymbeline was committed to print.) And, although some of the top baby names in the UK, according to BabyCentre’s annual Top 100 list, seem to be immovable (Oliver and Olivia are stalwarts), when you look further down 2023’s list, a few surprises jump out. For girls, we have Aurora (30, up 22 places), Violet (37, up 19 places) and Ophelia (90, a new entry). For boys, Sebastian (38, up 24 places), Mateo (63, a new entry) and Axel (76, a new entry) have surged. Plus, with more names being registered each year, even the most popular names will become less common as they make up a smaller percentage of the total.
So where has this newfound name bravery come from? A desire to stand out on crowded social media platforms, perhaps? Humphrey certainly thinks so. “In today’s age of social media, uniqueness is paramount,” she tells me. “Your name is your destiny. It’s your identity. It’s your brand. It’s the first impression people will ever have of you. I think parents are finally recognising that name choice can really dictate the course of their children’s lives.”
Choosing a name that might dictate the course of her daughter’s life was certainly on 40-year-old Suzana
Barca’s mind when she came to name her now 22-month-old Phoenix Blaze. That it was unusual, though, was incidental. “We simply wanted a strong, powerful name to describe someone who will rise stronger when life tries to put them down,” she explains, which suggests that, perhaps, we use unique names to assign our children qualities or traits we admire. (I’m still trying to convince my partner that Lucky would be a great option.)
On the hunt specifically for a more unusual name, though, was Dominic Lee, 35, who works in a primary school and says he “notices name trends more than most” because of this. He chose the name Caspian for his son, who was born in February. “We definitely didn’t want a run-of-the-mill name and not a name that’s currently in the zeitgeist,” he says. “We did want one that was unusual and would make people notice him.” Carol Bajenting, 43, was similarly minded when she chose her 11-year-old daughter Zadie’s name. “A rare name will be easily remembered and it’s good to have that positive effect on other people,” she says. “It was important for us that our daughter was her own person and that started with her name. We didn’t want her to be compared or benchmarked against anyone else with the same name.”
Unsurprisingly, Boudicca Woodland, 46, has something to say about being compared to someone of the same name. “I often get asked where I’ve parked my chariot,” she says. Woodland, whose name came about when her mother looked out of her London hospital room after a tricky birth and saw, across the River Thames, the statue of Boudicca, decided to play it slightly safer with her own children’s names, plumping for Alfred Devereux, 13, and Seren Ariande, 10. “We went for traditional-ish followed by an unusual middle name,” she explains. “I was bullied at times for my name and ended up choosing to go by my middle name, Lee, for a few years as a teenager at a new school.” Although Woodland loves her name now, she wanted to give her children a choice as they were growing up, lest they, too, felt singled out. “It must be hard for a quiet child to have a wild name.”
Although “wild names” might seem like a modern phenomenon, encouraged, perhaps, by the likes of Humphrey, Prunkl, and Strum, moving away from traditional names and towards something a little different is by no means a new trend. “It’s happened before,” says Richard Coates, a linguist and professor emeritus of onomastics (the study of proper names) at the University of Bristol. “The English stopped using most Anglo-Saxon names in about the 12th to 13th centuries and replaced them with NormanFrench ones. We’ve had inflows of names from France, the Mediterranean lands and the Celtic-speaking countries over the centuries, partly replacing earlier stocks.” Even gender-neutral names, the rise of which has been particularly notable in the past few years, aren’t a new thing.
“In the middle ages some given names, such as Philip and Nichol, could be used ambiguously,” says Coates. “What’s different this time is the extent to which the new names are new creations.”
Not everyone, though, is a fan of a made-up moniker. According to Lucy Higginson, 53, whose children are Madeleine, 18, and Alexander, 14, there’s simply no need for invented names, which she deems to be egotistical and “the definition of naff ”. There are plenty of great names, she explains, adding that she pities the school teachers who have to spell the names parents have made up. “It seems like a bleating plea for attention,” she says. “I think it’s a real curse to saddle a child with a name they will have to spell out for the rest of their lives. A name has to fit for life. Lots of people name children because it fits the baby, but that baby will hopefully be a 50-year-old one day, who will want to be taken seriously and treated professionally.”
How a name will be received at school or within a workplace has, typically, been a key concern for parents, with many worried that a child with an unusual name will be bullied at school and then not taken seriously at work. However, Strum has noticed fewer clients approaching her with this
anxiety. “People don’t see names as holding you back any more,” she says. “Whereas before, if you wanted your child to have a serious job, you might give them a serious name – an Elizabeth or a Margaret – now we’re much more playful with our names.”
It makes sense, too. As names become more varied, we, as a society, become more accustomed to seeing and hearing unusual ones. It’s not entirely inconceivable, then, that we might, one day, vote in a prime minister called Sage or Wren or Atlas. Possible, too, is that, soon, the popular names today will eventually be seen as rare. Will Olivia or Oliver, in due course, be deemed, by Humphrey or Prunkl or Strum, to be “unique gems”? Perhaps.
In the meantime, I suspect the best we can do is follow the advice of Bajenting, mum of Zadie. “I think it’s a privilege for parents to choose a name for their child. And this privilege is supposed to be fun and liberating,” she says. “But that privilege comes with a responsibility later on to explain to the child the thinking process in deciding their name.” And, while I’m a huge advocate of unusual and surprising names, I, personally, can’t imagine that conversation – one you’d hope would be intimate and heartfelt, however unorthodox the choice – starting with: “So we paid $30,000…”
When we came together, we wanted to be everything, because our ears and eyes were everywhere
you didn’t feel like you could do that.”
Moore meticulously maps out the group’s long trajectory across three decades and 16 albums, during which they went from music press darlings to the brink of mainstream success. Daydream Nation is now widely regarded as their greatest album and a major influence on the generation that followed, most notably Nirvana. Along the way, they released Into the Groove(y), a cover of the Madonna song under the name Ciccone Youth, collaborated with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D on the single Kool Thing, and were lauded by Neil Young, who invited them to tour with him in 1991. Always slightly ahead of the game, they also hired the young and unknown Spike Jonze to direct the video for their song 100%, and this particular brand of downtown New York cool somehow endured even as they signed a major deal with Geffen Records in 1990.
Throughout the book, the musical reportage is seasoned by biographical passages that give us a glimpse of Moore’s inner life beyond music, including his formative but fraught friendship with a flamboyant young gay man, Harold Paris, who took umbrage at what he saw as Moore’s pretensions when he began hanging out with the downtown music and art crowd.
“I think Harold was OK with the band, but he just sort of bristled at the fact that he wasn’t along for the ride any more,” says Moore, “and that I was buying into this real downtown New York sarkiness, which was such an affectation. I see clips of myself now and I think, God, I would punch myself in the face. So, I get it, but there was also an unrequited love there. He admitted as much later but, back then, I didn’t really want to talk about it in my own frightened hetero way.”
At times, I say, it felt to me like there was another more deeply personal memoir buried somewhere in this bigger panoramic account of his musical life. “I felt I could have expanded that side a lot more, actually,” he replies. “I mean Just Kids, Patti Smith’s memoir, is essentially about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. That’s the reason she wrote it and what makes it tick, that very simple one-on-one relationship. At one point, I did step back and think, that’s what I should be writing about, but people want to know about the other stuff, the band, the scene, so I put it all in there and it was huge.”
In order to have taken that more intimate approach, though, he would have had to recount in detail the messy fracturing of his longterm relationship with Gordon, which happened in 2011 after 30 years as rock’s coolest couple, 27 of them as husband and wife. The announcement of their separation sent shock waves of disappointment and disbelief through an indie-rock culture in which they had acquired a revered status. The journalist Dorian Lynskey memorably once described their relationship as seeming “as solid as their music was tempestuous: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward with feedback”.
While Gordon poured her hurt and simmering sense of betrayal into her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, Moore has remained tight-lipped on the subject. In Sonic Life, he maintains that silence to a great degree, save for the admission that they attended marriage counselling “to no avail”, concentrating instead on the flowering of his overlapping romance with Prinz. When I mention this and recall how much their fans had invested in Gordon and him as a kind of ideal modern creative couple, he nods but looks uncomfortable.
“I guess so and understand that to a degree. I get it that there was a lot of public emotion invested in what was perceived, but I really had nothing to do with that and it doesn’t really define anything as to what happened creatively.” He pauses for a moment, before responding pointedly: “Usually when people ask me stuff like this, I’m like, ‘Do I know you?’ Or, ‘Why does that even interest you so much?’ I had certainly no interest in writing about it or indeed feel like it’s a topic worth sharing apart from with family or intimates. Certainly not publicly, but of course it was difficult. Everyone who has a fissure in their relationship, no matter how long or short, it’s just no fun for anyone.”
In many ways, Sonic Life is an elegy not just for Sonic Youth, but for lost time when punk and post-punk energised a generation and reverberated through the music that his group and others made in their wake. “Punk was limited but it could not go away,” Moore says, “because no one wanted to see it dissipate. To me it just made it feel like everything was possible.”
The sense of liberating possibility and shared secret knowledge that underground rock culture once created seems impossibly distant in our globally connected age of information overload. Moore nods in agreement but remains an eternal – and youthful sounding – optimist. “There has been a paradigm shift in how we access stuff and rock music has been commodified to a degree that there is hardly any shock value there any more,” he says, “but there’s always incredible music being made, from avant-garde jazz and rock to punk. Everybody’s in the pool, swimming around. That’s always going to be happening. Nothing is dying.”
• Sonic Life by Thurston Moore is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
It was the last time I watched anything that genuinely surprised me
what was so special about filming it was how Sofia conceived the story visually. When she makes films she has a series of individual images in her head that define the narrative; she doesn’t rely on dialogue or plot devices but communicates what characters are feeling with a specific cinematic language. It is a different form of storytelling, and it was incredibly satisfying to capture one of her visions on film, like the image of Bill Murray sat on a bed in a yukata.”
It’s true that Sofia Coppola used none of the gimmicks of her maleheavy peer group, no mind-bending plot twists or avant-garde camera trickery. In fact, Acord tells me, it was shot mostly on an Aaton 35-III, a 35mm camera Jean-Luc Godard had commissioned with the brief that it fit into the glove box of his car – also handy for carrying around Tokyo streets at night discreetly. I still recall the shock of the new the first time I saw the bold opening shot, in which a Kevin Shields riff scores a closeup of Scarlett Johansson’s horizontal back in sheer pink underwear. I’m a similar age to Johansson, and though the shot was not entirely dissimilar to something you might have found in the infamous lad mags aimed at my demographic back then – Loaded, FHM, Nuts, Zoo – there was something about its colour palette and refinement that made it appear as if from another dimension. Coppola has said the shot was inspired by the 1970s hyperrealist paintings of John Kacere, but does just enough to subvert the male gaze implicit in those paintings and turn it into something distinctly feminine. The pink pants are slightly too big, the pale blue merino top slightly too casual and comfortable-looking, the body slightly too real, in a decade of thongs, touched-up tans, fake boobs, and size-zero waists, to code-signal to the fabricated male fantasy of the time. * **
Over email, Coppola tells me of another inspiration for this subtle, feminine mood: a young Japanese photographer who came to prominence in the 1990s called Hiromix. “She was a huge influence – it was before Instagram and snapshot culture, and it was so cool for me to see this intimate world of girls, the way she showed it, that I really related to.” Coppola echoes this in a new book, published by Mack, Sofia Coppola Archive: “[Japan] seemed to be a place where girl culture was dominant… I met Hiromix, and her photographs made a big impression on me… with all this in my head, I sat at my dining table at night back in Los Angeles and tried to pull together impressions that I thought could come together into a story for a film.”
I caught up with Hiromix this spring, in her leafy neighbourhood in Tokyo, and for her, remembering the turn of the century brought back mixed emotions. On the one hand, Japan had been in the economic doldrums after the bursting of the bubble economy, but this led to a changing of the guard – and a photography scene once dominated by older men with expensive cameras gave way to a younger generation of female photographers who created snapshot culture with cheap 35mm compacts. Known as onnanokoshashin, “girly photography”, it included artists such as Yurie Nagashima and Mika Ninagawa, but Hiromix was its megastar.
As we strolled the sakura-lined suburban backstreets taking photographs, we talked about the compact camera I was shooting on, which Hiromix had made famous; the Konica Big Mini. She was all smiles, but winced when I mentioned another Japanese compact, the Yashica T4. That camera is forever associated with the disgraced fashion photographer Terry Richardson who, along with Russell Brand, seems the ultimate relic of what the Economist recently called “the nasty noughties”. And if you want another reason to hold back on the 2000s nostalgia, you need only look at the 2005 “Sex Issue” of Vice, which features Hiromix on the cover, and included photographs of her apparently having sex with Richardson, as well as a blindfold competition to see who gives the best blowjobs, “gays or girls”, and a nauseating photo essay featuring Iraqi corpses, where the first question posed by Vice to the anonymous photographer, is: “So, what’s the pussy sitch out there?” (Thank god for “cancel culture” and “the woke brigade”!) Hiromix regrets those hypersexualised days, and told me she was exploited by older male photographers, and though she still seemed to be on OK terms with Coppola, as we came to the end of our walk, she looked at me and said: “People tell me I inspired Lost in Translation, but if that’s true, then I think maybe Sofia misunderstood my work.”
This ambivalence about the film is echoed by other Japanese people who featured in it, such as Akiko Monou (the girl in the fur hat who sings karaoke with Murray), Akira Matsui, a pro skateboarder who appears as Hans, and senior staff at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (the film’s setting), for whom the making of the movie brought back fond memories, but the film itself raised eyebrows. “Those party scenes,” Monou tells me, “were such a great portrayal of Japan at that time. Nobody had smartphones, so everybody would let their hair down more, and it captured that sense of carefree fun. But I’m not sure about other parts of the film; I think some of the Japanese characters – like the director shouting at Bill Murray – were a little… exaggerated.”
A less diplomatic word might have been “stereotypical”. Matsui says he understands some of the criticisms levelled at the film, but also thinks Bill and Charlotte’s night out in Tokyo, orchestrated by Fumihiro “Charlie Brown” Hayashi (who plays himself, the editor of a cult Japanese magazine called Dune), really captures Tokyo in the 00s. “In those scenes you have cameos from Nobuhiko Kitamura, the founder of [fashion brand] Hysteric Glamour, [renowned designer and musician] Hiroshi Fujiwara, Hiromix, gallery owners, artists, surfers… they were all brought together by Charlie, who was so important for the art world because he connected the underground with the mainstream.”
Hayashi was Coppola’s introduction to the scene in Japan in the 1990s, she tells me: “He was important, as he first hired me to take photographs and cared about my point of view, which gave me the confidence to make my first film, and he showed me an exciting world in Tokyo. He had culture and taste and appreciated my eye.” It’s worth remembering that all this followed the spectacular fallout from Coppola’s lambasted performance as Mary Corleone in the final instalment of her father’s Godfather trilogy. Far from Hollywood, Japan was a place where she could reinvent herself.
No matter the location, Coppola often presents the world she knows in her films: white, wealthy, feminine. I grew up brown-skinned, working-class, and male, so it would be easy for me to think of Coppola, and in turn Charlotte, as the quintessential poor little rich girl. I often wonder what it is, exactly, about Lost in Translation, beyond a nostalgia for how the world might have turned out, that resonates so deeply. I’m not alone – the film’s most popular Google search is: “What is the point of Lost in Translation?”, a question I put to Sofia herself.
“The film started with wanting to make something about my experience of being [in Tokyo] in my 20s at that time and the feeling it gave me. The wandering, being away from home and the thrill of discovery. It is all about a mood, a feeling to me, trying to capture how I felt there… I was so surprised so many people connected to it, it was so personal to me and I thought: ‘Who cares about a privileged young woman who doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life?’ But the ultimate thing it was about, to me, was a connection. And I think we’re all looking for this. It was about unexpected moments of connection.”
That’s it, exactly. Encoded in Lost in Translation is that kind of liminal melancholy we feel at certain points in our lives, when one era is ending, but another has not quite begun. These moments often precede a breakthrough, if we only pay enough attention. And to go back to nostalgia for a moment… In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym suggests the term could be split into two – not always binary – types: restorative and reflective. The former is what nationalism thrives on: the attempt to rebuild an imagined past that never really existed (Make America great again!). The latter, and perhaps healthier, version of nostalgia, however, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt… [it] loves details, not symbols.”
What makes me want to hold on to Lost in Translation, in spite of its flaws, made only more evident by the years? The details. The languorous, laconic beauty of pre-smartphone travel. The scenes where Charlotte is alone in her hotel room, listening to a CD (Beck’s downbeat album Sea Change came out during the month of filming, and drove those scenes, according to Acord), gazing at the skyline or daydreaming on her bed, are some of the movie’s most stirring and, looking back, poignant passages. Charlotte would be on that bed scrolling her socials now – no way would she have hung out with Bob. I miss this slowness, or what Coppola’s Italian ancestors might have called otium divinorum: divine idleness. I also miss the ambiguity, and the idea that if Charlotte and Bob were real, their experiences would linger on only in private memories and Polaroids (“loss is itself lost”, to quote Fisher again). I miss the promise of such counterintuitive encounters; in 2023, my WhatsApp groups are formed around my loves and alliances, algorithms lead me toward confirmation bias, Netflix suggests films it thinks I will like based on films I’ve already seen. But I think of lifelong friends made during my pre-internet travels, because I was stuck with them somewhere far away from home, and struck up a conversation because I had nowhere else to go (like online). The scene where Bob and a Japanese man (in real life, the gallerist Akimitsu Naruyama) try to converse in bad French reminds me of encounters with Japanese kids I had as a child, our friendships revolving around not just our similarities, but also our differences, which brings to mind another anachronistic 90s/early 00s word: fusion–that is, the blurring of seemingly disparate things to create something new.
What to do with nostalgia for an era of such contradictions? Hegel thought that each era contained a specific insight, and nostalgia was the holding on to what was good. The key was not to want to go back, but to achieve equilibrium in the present by mixing the best bits of each era and losing the worst elements. When I asked Sofia Coppola a couple of such retrospective questions, however, she (perhaps wisely) gave me short answers. Twenty years later, is there anything she’d change about Lost in Translation? “I feel like [my films] are what they are, I wouldn’t want to change them…” Does Lost in Translation make her nostalgic? “It was a different time, and it’s nice to go back to it through the film.”
Maybe, in the end, that’s all that should be said for those of us who came of age in the 2000s; it was a different time. It is nice to go back to it through film.Only through film.
Johny Pitts is a writer, artist and broadcaster. His new series, The Failure ofthe Future, will air on BBC Radio 4 from 16 January
the discomfort of witnessing the other person’s disappointment. But I’m trying to persuade you to choose guilt as the lesser of two evils. It takes courage to feel it, because it is painful. But if you don’t go through the pain of guilt, the pleasant life you have worked so hard to create will be under threat. If you chose to rescue your mother as she wants, firstly you would not be on the path you want to be and, secondly, your resentment towards your parents would feel worse than the guilt you feel now. To continue to improve your own mental health and to experience longterm emotional wellbeing, it is necessary for you to endure the challenging emotion of guilt in the short term.
As it is unavoidable, practise accepting the sensation of guilt without immediately reacting. Guilt may be experienced as physical discomfort. Familiarise yourself with its physical manifestations. All emotions are experienced physically and it’s how we interpret those sensations that we come up with a name for them. It could be muscle tension, a lurching feeling in the stomach, churning insides, racing thoughts, shortness of breath. The more you can embrace the bodily sensations guilt generates, the less inclined you’ll be to fear and evade them. Take a moment to determine where in the body you experience these sensations. Observe them and breathe into them. You have the capacity to endure this emotion.
You must set boundaries – not in anger but with kindness and love. Limit those phone calls so you don’t spend your days in dread. You can give her the number of a crisis hotline such as the Samaritans (call 116 123), because I strongly advise blocking her number for periods when you’ve told her you won’t be available, so you can relax and live your own life rather than hers. If you believe your mother is in immediate danger and unwilling to seek help, you may want to involve her GP and/ or her local mental-health crisis team to inform them of the situation.
Recommended reading Difficult Mothers: Understand and Overcoming Their Power by Terri Apter; and Toxic Parents by Susan Forward.
Every week Philippa Perry addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Philippa, please send your problem to askphilippa@guardian.co.uk. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions
The Book You Want Everyone You Love* To Read *(and maybe a few you don’t) by Philippa Perry is published by Cornerstone at £18.99. Buy it for £16.14 at guardianbookshop.com
For your own sake you need to endure the emotion of guilt
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.”
I had a dark room to develop pictures, and it’s also where I slept