GHANA IS HOME

“Why Ghana?” I asked. (“Why film?” would come later.) My mind’s eye wanted to place Adam and Patrick’s photographs. Seeing coastline in black and white and imagining a bird’s-eye view of the same coastline as seen by God or Google, I wanted to place Adam and Patrick at work, in the where of their work. So I asked Adam, “Why Ghana?” He replied, “Ghana is home.” Having grown up between Accra, Johannesburg, and Los Angeles, Adam and Patrick Wilkinson shot Cinema Abokobi in the style of black-and-white production stills, in that Old Hollywood studio tradition. Somewhere between a slice of life of Ghana’s Volta and Eastern regions, and Abokobi itself (“It’s a poky town outside Accra” Adam clarifies), lies Cinema Abokobi.
Though the filmic golden age their photographs recall is classic LA, Adam insists, “Cinema Abokobi could not have happened in Los Angeles...Los Angeles has the cinemas, the video stores, and museums. Accra and Joburg have the interesting faces, the freedom, and sun... we can look at the project and say we were trying to figure what those movies meant to us as Ghanaians. But, largely, it came out of just wanting to do something.” Patrick explains, “I’m always scared when taking photos. It’s an interesting feeling. There’s an air of anxiety and excitement. So I take photos to get over my fear.” This air of precariousness persists in the photos themselves, as Cinema Abokobi hangs somewhere between Hollywood and global cinema, between Abokobi and LA, in a world all its own, as public as Ghana’s taxicabs and beaches and as private as recollections of home. While Adam and Patrick’s photographs appear like scenes from classic films, or perhaps dreamlike snapshots blurring cinema and memory, they also contain the specificity of contemporary Ghanaian landscape, industry, and urbanity. Their photographs are a way to look at Ghana, but are also a sightline into memories, into how we relate to cinema itself. Layering views of home with cinematic vignettes results in a deep and dreamlike rumination, documenting something between recreation and reality, between studio production and personal photo album. Not quite a remembering, of a film, of their home, or of the people they photographed, Adam and Patrick’s work functions more like an intervention, maintaining a tension between stylized cinematic narrative, dream logic, and the surreal psychology of the intimate.


Sarah Elbaum (MA African Studies, UCLA)