After centuries of hiding behind anonymity, the identity and works of Nigeria’s first indigenous professional photographer Jonathan Adagogo Green (J. A. Green) will be unveiled at a book launch in his honour on Thursday, March 1 at 11am, at the Royal Banquet Hall, Presidential Hotel, the Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital.
Titled: African Photographer J. A. Green (Reimagining The Indigenous And The Colonial), the book was published by the Indiana University Press United States.
The event is being organised by Emeritus Prof A. J. Alagoa’s Onyoma Research.
Born in Bonny, Rivers State in 1873, he studied photography in Sierra Leone and then established a studio in Bonny where he became one of the most prolific and accomplished indigenous photographers in West Africa.
Green, whose identity remained hidden behind his English surname, maintained a photography business in Bonny and worked mostly in the Niger Delta and its environs. His work covered a wide range of themes, including portraiture of the British colonial officials, European merchants, prominent chiefs and elites and their families, particularly in Bonny, Kalabari, Opobo and Okrika.
He also photographed scenes of life, including women making handicrafts, iron workers and weddings as well as commerce and buildings; both administrative and religious.
Some of his great iconic photographs include that of the late Oba Ovonramwen of Benin Empire in 1897, the British hulk and War Canoes published in prestigious newspapers and magazines like the London Illustrated News and other European publications.
Although his photographs were published in England and Europe to much acclaim, Green remained anonymous for more than a century and, according to Anderson and Aronson, he was ‘an African photographer hiding in plain sight’.
The editors of the book Professors Martha G. Anderson and Lisa Aronson and the contributors, Emeritus Professor E. J. Alagoa, Tam Fiofori and Christraud M. Geary, uncovered 350 of Green’s images in archives (in Britain and the US) publications and even private albums in Nigeria and abroad that celebrate the indigenous and the colonial during Green’s career as a photographer.
According to the organisers of the launch, the book ‘unifies these dispersed photographic images of Green and presents a history of the photographer and the area and times in which he worked.’
