In his street and studio photography, Barnor represents societies in transition in the 1950s and 1960s: Ghana moving toward independence, and London becoming a multicultural metropolis.

"[7] Barnor has spoken of how his work was rediscovered in 2007 during the "Ghana at 50" jubilee season by curator Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, who organised the first exhibition of his photographs at Black Cultural Archives (BCA).

"[4] At the age of 17, Barnor was teaching basket weaving at a missionary school and the headmaster gave him a camera "to play around with––it was a Kodak Brownie 127, made of plastic".

[21] Its name derives from the subject of an English comprehension extract he had studied as a schoolboy, entitled "Iduna's Grove", about a Norse goddess giving out magic apples to grant eternal youthfulness;[22] it was also an allusion to the expected practice of retouching sitters' faces to perfection — "Long before Photoshop existed you would use a pencil.

[4] Among those whom he photographed were Ghana's future first president Kwame Nkrumah (pictured kicking a football in one of Barnor's shots),[24] pan-Africanist politician J.

B. Danquah,[25] Sir Charles Arden-Clarke (last British governor of the Gold Coast), the Duchess of Kent and then American Vice-President Richard Nixon (when he attended Ghana's Independence ceremony in March 1957), as well as boxing champion Roy Ankrah.

[4] Barnor also sold photographs to other publications, notably the South African magazine Drum, which covered news, politics and entertainment.

Drum was founded in 1951 by Jim Bailey, with whom Barnor established an ongoing relationship, using the magazine's Fleet Street office as his base when he first went to London.

[21] His images from this period document Africans in Britain, notably his work as a fashion photographer with black models against London backdrops, often for the covers of Drum, then the leading magazine in Africa.

[21] In 1994, Barnor returned to London, where his work latterly began to be discovered by a new wider audience, through exhibitions at venues such as Black Cultural Archives (2007),[30] Rivington Place (2010), and elsewhere.

"[38] In 2022, the Foundation's launching initiative was a prize to promote established photographers from the African continent, and the first edition, which focused on West Africa, was won by Sènami Donoumassou.

Cutting across the divide between periphery and metropolis, Barnor’s images suggest that 'Africa' has never been a static entity, confined to the boundaries of geography, but has always had a diasporic dimension....

By virtue of mechanical reproduction, which undercuts the distinction between the original and the copy, photographs are vulnerable to a process of decontextualisation – making them orphans, thrown into the world without a fixed 'home'.

[64] In October 2015, Barnor's work was shown in Paris at the Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière in an exhibition entitled Ever Young that created "a narrative of two societies in transition".

[76] It has been said of him: "Photographer James Barnor is to decolonizing Ghana (and later to 1960s black Britain) what Oumar Ly is to Senegal or Malick Sidibe and Seydou Keita were to Mali.

"[77] In February 2022, Barnor was named in CasildART's list of the top six Black British photographers, alongside Charlie Phillips, Armet Francis, Neil Kenlock, Pogus Caesar and Vanley Burke.