I arrived in Ghana as an orientalist. I did not know this at the time.
My first photographs were of what I expected to find — images shaped by a prior imagination, by the visual grammar that determines what counts as worth photographing in an unfamiliar place. I was recording not what was there but what I had already decided was there.
At some point during that trip, I noticed what I was doing. The photographs in this series come from after that moment — ordinary Ghana, seen without the frame that I had brought with me.
I include this series because the realisation it documents became the foundation for everything I later made under the title My Orientalism Is Better Than Yours. The problem of the orientalist gaze is not primarily a political problem. It is a perceptual one. You do not know you are carrying it until you see its traces in your own work. Ghana is where I saw them.
