Portrait of a City: Accra Through the Lens of Nana Kofi Acquah

Nana Kofi Acquah has been photographing Accra for twenty years, and he still gets lost. Not geographically — he knows every shortcut, every traffic pattern, every neighborhood that has changed its name twice since independence. He gets lost in the way that good photographers do: in the gap between what he expects to see and what is actually there.

'Accra doesn't let you be comfortable,' he says. We are sitting in his studio in Labone, surrounded by prints that cover every surface. 'Just when you think you understand it, it becomes something else. That's what makes it impossible to stop photographing.'

His new book, 'Accra: A Visual Chronicle,' collects twenty years of work into a single volume that is less a documentary record than a love letter — complicated, honest, occasionally heartbroken. The city it depicts is not the Accra of tourism brochures or development reports. It is a city of contradictions: gleaming towers rising next to wooden kiosks, women in kente cloth scrolling smartphones, children playing football in the shadow of a half-built highway.

What Acquah captures, above all, is the texture of ordinary life. The way light falls on a market stall at six in the morning. The geometry of a tro-tro window. The expression on a man's face as he reads a newspaper headline that has not yet reached the rest of the world.