Old Parks, New Futures: Documenting the Uses of Open Space in an African City was a British Academy-funded research project exploring the historical, political, religious, economic, and everyday uses of public space in Kumasi, Ghana. My photographic contribution to the project focused on Jackson/Jubilee Park in Asem, a public space situated between the Yalwa Zongo and Fante New Town communities.
Working within a research team, I used photography as a way of observing how the park exists not simply as a physical location, but as a space shaped by changing communities, activities, memories, and forms of belonging. Over its nearly one-hundred-year history, the park has moved through different physical and social uses—from its colonial history and role in economic livelihoods to political gatherings, religious activity, and everyday community life.
The commission became an opportunity for me to think about portraiture beyond the individual. Here, the park itself became a kind of portrait: one formed through the people who move through it, the activities that take place there, and the histories that continue to accumulate within the landscape. The photographs document both human presence and the quieter details of the environment, asking how public space can hold memory while continually adapting to the present.
Selected photographs from the project were presented in a final exhibition in Kumasi in September 2023. The exhibition became another layer of the research, prompting visitors to share their own histories and experiences of the park and revealing the important role that open urban spaces can play in creating interaction, social belonging, and inclusivity within the city.
For me, Old Parks, New Futures reinforced an ongoing interest in how photography can move beyond documentation to become a tool for listening—revealing the relationships between people, place, memory, and the histories carried by everyday environments.
Reference:
