Felicia Abban (née Felicia Ewuraesi Gyasiwa Ansah) (1936-2024) was the only daughter among five children born to eminent Gold Coast photographer Joseph Emmanuel Kweku Gyasi Ansah and Theresa Yankey, a textile trader. Her work in documentary and studio photography encompassed portraiture, photojournalism, nature, and event photography beginning in the 1950s, spanning over six decades of practice. She trained from the age of 14 years in her father’s studio in Sekondi and was his only woman apprentice. After her marriage to Richard Bonso Abban in 1956, she moved from Sekondi to Accra where she set up her own professional photo studio named “Mrs. Felicia Abban’s Day and Night Quality Art Studio” in the central business district in proximity to “The “Deo Gratias” Studio: Bruce-Vanderpuije & Sons Photographic Laboratory” (established in Accra in 1922). Her husband, Richard Bonso Abban, was a textile designer, later to become creative director of the Ghana Textiles and Manufacturing Company (GTMC), whose most notable work is the design of the commemorative cloth that featured Ghana’s first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s, portrait for the Independence celebrations.
Mrs. Abban’s studio was established only a year before the Gold Coast colony would transition into the Ghana nation state, which became a Republic in 1960. During this period, she documented many significant political events as a member of the presidential press corps, all the while maintaining her studio and itinerant lens-based practice. In 1966 she was due to have travelled with President Nkrumah to Hanoi during the Cold War but could not because she discovered she was pregnant with her fourth child. While Nkrumah was out on this official duty, a military coup d’état was staged in Ghana which ousted his Pan-Africanist government and he was subsequently exiled until he died in 1972 in Sekou Toure’s Guinea. After the coup, Abban moved on to work with Guinea Press—the state press and printing house for Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP), now New Times Corporation—in Accra. Throughout her illustrious and industrious career, Abban chalked many firsts: she was generally regarded as Ghana’s first known professional woman photographer, among such pioneering figures in Africa; she was a founding member of the Ghana Union of Professional Photographers (GUPP) in 1987 and later became its first elected woman president; she was also the first woman to have joined Ghana’s presidential press corps in the First Republic (1960-1966). During her time with GUPP Abban engaged in countless training and workshop programs around the country inspiring generations of photographers.
Mrs. Abban’s legacy transcends photography into cinema as she played a vital early role in mentoring seminal filmmaker Kwaw Ansah (one of her younger siblings) in lens-based practice. Other siblings of hers include veteran musician Tumi Ebow Ansah, Ato Ansah, and fashion legend Kofi Ansah (1951-2014). She completely retired from photography in 2017. Her photographic work made its first public appearance in an art exhibition in the group show Accra: Portraits of a City (2017) at the ANO gallery in Accra. She was also one of six artists–alongside El Anatsui, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Ibrahim Mahama, Selasi Awusi Sosu, and John Akomfrah–selected to feature at the first-ever Ghana pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. That same year, her photographs were exhibited at the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography, themed Streams of Consciousness: A Concatenation of Dividuals.
