In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, photography began to reshape how West African societies recorded memory, authority, and identity. In the eastern Niger Delta, one of the most prominent early Nigerian photographers was Jonathan Adagogo Green, widely known as J. A. Green.
Born in 1873 in Ayama, also called Peterside, near Bonny in present day Rivers State, Green emerged during a period when Bonny stood at the crossroads of trade, diplomacy, Christianity, and expanding British influence. His photographs captured a society negotiating continuity and change, preserving both tradition and adaptation in a rapidly shifting political environment.
Green died in 1905 at the age of thirty two, leaving behind a body of work that continues to shape historical understanding of the Niger Delta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Early Life and Professional Formation
Jonathan Adagogo Green was raised in Bonny after the death of his father in 1875. He later attended school in Lagos and may also have studied in Sierra Leone, regions that were important centers of education and Christian mission activity in West Africa during the nineteenth century.
By 1891, Green had established his photographic practice in Bonny. From this base, he built a reputation that extended across the Niger Delta. His studio served a diverse clientele that included local elites, families, merchants, and expatriates residing in the region.
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Bonny, Trade, and the Demand for Portraiture
Bonny was one of the most commercially active port kingdoms in the Niger Delta. Long involved in Atlantic trade networks, the town had developed strong internal hierarchies and ceremonial traditions. Status was visible in clothing, regalia, titles, and public performance.
Photography quickly became another tool for displaying standing and modernity. A portrait could confirm lineage, commemorate achievement, and circulate prestige beyond local communities. Green’s work reflects this demand. His studio portraits often present sitters in composed, confident poses, sometimes dressed in European style garments, sometimes in traditional attire, and often blending both influences within a single image.
These portraits reveal more than individual likeness. They show how Niger Delta communities chose to represent themselves in a new visual medium.
Subjects and Themes in Green’s Work
The range of subjects attributed to Green demonstrates the breadth of his practice. His photographs include:
• Portraits of prominent chiefs and their families
• Images of British colonial officers and European merchants
• Group portraits and community figures
• Scenes of daily life, commerce, and built environments
Through these images, viewers encounter a region shaped by river networks, trade houses, ceremonial gatherings, and evolving social relationships. The photographs capture clothing styles, architecture, and patterns of interaction that written records alone cannot fully convey.
Green’s portraits of chiefs are particularly notable for their emphasis on authority. Staffs, textiles, jewelry, and posture are carefully arranged, presenting leadership as dignified and composed. At the same time, his images of everyday settings document a working society grounded in markets, river transport, and domestic life.
Archival Preservation and Surviving Collections
Green’s photographs survive in major international research collections. The British Museum holds works attributed to him and provides biographical documentation of his life.
The Getty Research Institute preserves an album titled “J. A. Green photographs of Nigeria album, 1894 to 1900,” containing seventy four photographs. The album offers visual evidence of his sustained activity during the 1890s and demonstrates that his work circulated beyond a single town.
The Unilever Archives also maintains photographs attributed to Green, reflecting the broader commercial networks in which his images moved. These institutional holdings ensure that his photographs remain accessible to historians, curators, and the public.
A Photographer in a Changing Colonial Era
Green worked during a period when British political control in the Niger Delta was consolidating. His clientele included both local leaders and expatriate officials, placing his studio at a meeting point between indigenous authority and colonial administration.
His photographs show individuals navigating this layered world. Traditional regalia appears alongside imported fabrics. Riverine landscapes stand beside trading posts and administrative buildings. The camera became a medium through which people asserted presence, stability, and continuity amid transformation.
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Legacy in Nigerian Visual History
Jonathan Adagogo Green’s career was brief, yet his impact endures through the survival of his images. He belongs to the earliest generation of Nigerian born professional photographers whose work remains preserved in substantial archival form.
His photographs continue to inform scholarship on the Niger Delta, colonial interaction, and African studio practice. More importantly, they provide direct visual testimony of how Bonny and surrounding communities saw themselves at the dawn of the twentieth century.
In each portrait and landscape, Green preserved not just faces and buildings, but moments of self definition in a time of profound change.
Author’s Note
Jonathan Adagogo Green’s photographs remain powerful because they return the Niger Delta to its own voice. Chiefs, merchants, families, and towns appear not as background figures in colonial narratives, but as subjects standing firmly before the camera. Through a brief career that ended in 1905, Green secured a visual inheritance for Rivers State and the wider Delta, one that continues to illuminate identity, authority, and community more than a century later.
References
British Museum, “Jonathan A Green” biographical entry, Collections Online.
Getty Research Institute, “J. A. Green photographs of Nigeria album, 1894 to 1900” collection description.
Unilever Archives, “Jonathan Adagogo Green” collection notes.
Oxford Reference, “Green, Jonathan Adagogo (1873 to 1905)” biographical entry.
Martha G. Anderson and Lisa Aronson, “Jonathan A. Green: An African Photographer Hiding in Plain Sight,” African Arts, 2011.
Martha G. Anderson and Lisa Aronson, African Photographer J. A. Green: Reimagining the Indigenous and the Colonial, Indiana University Press, 2017.
