In June 2014, as part of a project on West African wax-print, I met Felicia Ansah Abban, who is widely viewed as Ghana's first woman professional photographer. The initial subject of conversation was Robert Abban, Felicia's deceased husband who designed the commemorative cloth that featured Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's portrait for the independence celebrations in 1957, but the conversation quickly turned to the framed portraits and news features on the family room walls of Abban's Accra home. Dated from the late 1950s onward, news clippings tout Felicia Abban as Ghana's “first female professional photographer” and several photographers cite Felicia Abban as the first Ghanaian woman photographer and owner of an Accra studio.1 Abban was the first president's private photographer for several years during the 1960s and Nkrumah was “one of the many high-profile clients” she photographed during the early days of independence.
When I met with Abban over the next...