Paul Strand’s Ghana and photography after colonialism

Paul Strand’s book Ghana: An African Portrait (published in the year of his death, 1976) is reconsidered as a conflicted attempt to represent postcolonial nationhood. Comparisons with Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954) are used to open up the central problem of how to represent a postcolonial state in the making while also dealing with the author-photographer’s difference from the subjects and subjectivities depicted. This is explored through the thematic of portraiture, of looking and being looked at, particularly of how the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the relationship between leader and postcolonial nation is portrayed.