The “Deo Gratias” studio

JK Bruce Vanderpuije is a pioneer of photography in West Africa and Ghana. The son of a bourgeois family in Accra, he opened his own institution: the Deo-Gratias Photo Studio in 1922 in the Jamestown area. At 23, he began making portraits of family and group of the British occupiers, traders Indian or black aristocracy of the city. After Ghana's independence in 1957, he designed campaigns for international companies including oil. He left his son Isaac, who took over the Deo Gratias-Studio, a fund primarily consists of glass plate negatives, quality arts and literature from the colonial period with no equivalent in West Africa.