Black and white photograph of the late Oba Ovonramwen shows the traditional ruler sitting on a wicker chair with three African troops standing at attention in military uniform.
The Oba wears an elaborate and voluminous velvet gown covering his whole body, barely revealing his chained ankles. Also, a photograph, which is a single portrait of oba, shows him sitting on a wicker chair.
Another photograph shows oba with Captain Herbert, the child, an African soldier, and several other African attendants. All these form the collections of one of Nigeria’s foremost professional photographers, Jonathan Adagogo Green.
He took these pictures aboard the SS Ivy, the ship conveying the monarch as it was anchored off the Bonny River on its way to Calabar. Nearly every album or collection of photographs from Nigeria dating to this period includes at least one of Green’s portraits of the late Oba of Benin.
Seventy-six years after his death, a new research on Green’s life and works entitled: The two worlds of artist/photographer J. A. Green, conducted by a US-based scholar, Dr. Lisa Aronson of Skidmore College, New York, was the topic of a lecture in Lagos last week.
The lecture, organised by Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, was presented by Aronson and it brought fresh perspectives to discussions on who is the first Nigerian modern artist between J. A. Green and Aina Onabolu? In the past month, Aronson has been conducting indepth research in the Niger Delta, expected to culminate in the first and only publication on the artist.
Frontline photographers, such as Pa J. D. Okhia Ojekere, Tam Fiofori, Don Barber, Olu Amoda, Toyin Akinoso, Onyema Ofoedu-Okeke, Abraham Oghobase and other young photographers and visual artists were among those at the presentation.
Green, a professional photographer was born in Bonny, in 1873. He was the son of a successful Ibani Ijaw palm oil trader, Chief Sunju Dublin Green, who worked closely with foreing traders and missionaries.
These relationships might have helped his son’s career. He served as the primary photographer for the British and his own people, between the early 1890s and when he died at 32. Although his professional stamp, “J. A. Green, Artist Photographer, Bonny, Opobo & co” concealed his African identity behind his British sounding name.
Aronson said she postponed her travels to Nigeria for three years until an improvement in security.
She is happy that she enjoyed a safe productive visit to the Niger Delta last month.
Her research on Green began five years ago when she and her two American colleagues, Martha Anderson and Chris Geary along with Professor Emeritus E. J. Alagoa received a Getty Grant to document Green’s photographs in British archives.
This scholarship, she said, gave her the opportunity to learn about Green’s life as a photographer.
She said: “I first became familiar with Green’s photos while researching the history of textile production, use, and trade in Southeastern Nigeria, with my initial focus on weaving in Akwete, Ndoki, in Imo State.
I discovered Green’s photos of imported textile usage in the Niger Delta before I came to realise Green’s Ibani Ijaw identity.
According to the research, after Green’s death, his nephew, Gobo, took over the business. Gobo did some of his own photography, but mainly used Green’s original plates to reproduce the original photographs until his death in 1936.
The business was then taken over by Gobo’s son, James Adagogo Green, who continued the practice of reproducing J. A. Green’s original images until his own death in 1993, and even capitalised on J. A. Green’s own initials, leading many to think that James was the original J, A. Green.
Aronson showed several photographs by Green and the images revealed the individuals, including Europeans and Africans, who lived and worked in the area. Green’s portraits of the British showed them in Edwardian attires at work or play.
Those of the Ijaw showed them in their own contemporary styles of dress, made of cloth acquired from local and foreign sources.
Some of Green’s most extraordinary portraits were of Ijaw chiefs from Bonny, Opobo, and the Kalabari Ijaw region, seated with their wives, children, and other members of their extended families.
She observed that what stands out in these portraits, compared with those of the British, is that the latter presented themselves in casual, and occasionally reclining, poses typical of Edwardian portraiture, often resulting in an overall asymmetrical composition.
Aronson said: “By contrast, the Ijaw prefer to assume frontal poses, with hands and feet fully visible and with emphasis on symmetry and balance. This conforms to the aesthetic preferences of other African sitters along the western and central African coast, which dominated photography from the late 19th Century well into the 1970s.
Moreover, these portraits conveyed a rich sense of design derived from the elaborately patterned gowns, which Green consciously coordinated with the architectural details in the backgrounds of his photographs.
Her position, elicited reactions from some members of the audience who claimed that the symmetrical arrangement of Africans in Green’s photographs was a function of the colonial administrators’ oppression of Blacks.
Aronson said the imported, obelisk-style tombstone that marks Green’s grave in Bonny, identifies him as a professional artist-photographer. Green’s only known self-portrait, he said, showed him at 21 dressed in a respectable Western-style suit, vest, and necktie with a boutonniere in his lapel.
Green attended the Church Missionary Society (CMS) High School in Bonny and it may have been Sierra-Leonians affiliated with the CMS who taught him photography.
His legacy
What became of Green’s legacy? Aronson answers: “Green left behind a rich and varied collection of photographs that not only captures a significant moments in Nigeria’s early history but also exhibits his exceptional artistic vision.
“Green was among several prominent Africans working as professional photographers along the coasts of western and central Africa in the late 19th Century, including the Ghanaian Lutterodt brothers, the Sierra Leonian W. S. Johnston, and Walwin B. Holm, a Ghanaian working in Lagos.
Using box cameras and glass plates their repertoires, like Green’s, included landscapes, seascapes, views of public buildings, and, most particularly, portraits. Some of them, along with their European competitors, advertised their services widely in urban newspapers and moved freely along the coast with cameras and backdrops in hand to meet the demands of their European and African clients.”
Green’s photogarphs were not all for the British administrators as he confined his works mainly to the Bonny (and Opobo) region of the Niger Delta, which by the 1890s was a thriving commercial centre of palm oil trade and the hub British colonisation of the region.
At that time, the Ibani Ijaw town of Bonny was at the heart of maritime commerce, with the slave trade at its peak in the 18th Century and the palm oil trade dominating throughout the 19th Century.
Green’s photographic skills were in great demand and his business boomed at a time Bonny functioned as the administrative centre of the protectorate throughout the historical trajectory, putting him at the hub of British imperialist activity.
Aronson said though Green’s life was short, a close relative, Gobo, took over his thriving business after his death. Following Gobo’s own death in 1935, another relative, James A. Green, ran the studio until 1993 when he died.
She said: “James A. Green capitalised on Jonathan’s fame by using an embossed stamp that identified him as “J. A. Green” and even reproduced photos from his predecessor’s turn-of the-century glass plates. Both Gobo and James trained other photographers, so the Green legacy lives on.
Early works
Green’s earliest documented photograph is a half-portrait of a Kalabari chief who died in 1890.
In 15 years, he photographed about 150 different images in a wide range of themes.
His works are in major collections in the British Museum, London; Rhodes House, Oxford; Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool; Unilever Archives, Port Sunlight; Manchester University Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and the National Museum of African Art, in Washington D.C USA.
Apart from portraits and landscapes, Green’s works included the narrative-like scenes of Ijaw people that engaged in local industries, such as weaving, cotton winding, basket making, ironwork, and the cracking of palm nuts.
Among his early works were several images showing scantily dressed African women in provocative poses.
With this fresh window on another foremost Nigerian artist, art historians will expand the frontiers to ascertain the father of modern Nigerian visual art.
Feelers have it that a Lagos photographer, Da Costa was also among the early photographers of the pre-Independence era. There could be more revelations in future that will shape art history.
