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A Young Photographer’s Poetic View of Everyday Life in Ghana
In his landscapes and portraits, Kay Kwabia translates city scenes in and around Accra into atmospheric images.
The warm orange glow of the streetlight in Early Risers I (2021), the photographer Kay Kwabia’s atmospheric image of daybreak in Sekondi-Takoradi, tipped me off. Its soft emission fused with the incandescent car headlights to illuminate a corner of the dimly lit street. That light, spilling onto the cream-colored building, prompted me to sift through my bookshelves, where I pulled Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In the first scene of the Ghanaian writer’s sharp and cynical debut about a fledgling postcolonial nation, a driver disembarks from a bus and tries to light a cigarette: “The head refused to catch, however; there was only the humid orange glow as the driver resignedly threw away the stick and took out another.”
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Is it a coincidence that Armah and Kwabia, whose image wrested my attention, share not only a home country but a city? Maybe. Still, it feels apt that Armah was born in Sekondi-Takoradi, the twin metropolis where Kwabia, who now lives in Accra, spent his formative years and credits with shaping his visual language. The blues and greens of the port city can be found throughout Kwabia’s mellow representations of Ghana. They are in the awning and trash bins of Early Risers II (2021), taken during a morning stroll. In two pictures titled Play with Your Food (2020), green vibrates from kontomire leaves, which hold drying dandelions resting against a sliced mango in one image and serves as the background for Kwabia’s aunt’s gold earrings in the other.
Kay Kwabia, Early Risers II, Sekondi, 2021
Kwabia does not live in Armah’s Ghana, which was a transitory space between colonial rule and democratic promise, but his images operate on a similar poetic register as the author’s writing. Compared to Armah, the photographer has a more optimistic view of the nation, now sixty-six years independent. Kwabia focuses on the beauty of quotidian living in Accra and its nearby cities, finding dreamscapes where others might see only harsh realities. In Early Risers II, Kwabia highlights a pair of trees in Sekondi-Takoradi. Backdropped by the water, the woody plants watch the city shake off its slumber.
Kwabia’s way of seeing might have something to do with his early childhood in Kwahu Plateau, where he was surrounded by the natural world. When he started taking photographs on a smartphone in 2013, he was drawn to capturing insects and plants. The switch to more sophisticated digital cameras only clarified his desire to seek out peacefulness and follow his aesthetic sensibilities. Ghana, to Kwabia, is synonymous with beauty, and his relatively young practice makes that clear. Projects are guided by instinct, boredom, and fancy. Earlier pictures experiment with the earth and its tones, while later ones proudly gamble with more vibrant colors. The results, whether staged still lifes, fashion portraits, or landscapes, are always refreshing: they tickle the senses, activate the imagination, and soothe the soul.
All photographs courtesy the artist
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 252, “Accra.”
