Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873–1905): Nigeria’s First Professional Photographer

Jonathan Adagogo Green was Nigeria’s first known professional photographer and one of the earliest documented West African photographers. Born in Bonny, in present-day Rivers State, Green was of Ibani (Ijaw) heritage and came of age during a time of major political and cultural shifts in the Niger Delta region. His work provides one of the most vivid visual archives of life in colonial Southern Nigeria at the turn of the 20th century.

Educated in Sierra Leone and trained in photography in the United Kingdom, Green returned to Nigeria around 1891 and established a successful photography studio in Bonny. He later worked across other areas, including Opobo, Brass, and Calabar. Green’s portraits and documentary photographs captured African elites, traditional rulers, missionaries, colonial administrators, and local cultural practices with striking clarity.

His camera offered a rare African perspective during an era when European colonialists produced most visual records of the continent. In this sense, Green’s lens functioned as a counter-narrative, affirming African identity and complexity in a colonial world that often sought to distort or erase it. Because his name sounded British, Jonathan Adagogo Green was able to secure well-paid jobs from the highly placed British colonial officers in Southern Nigeria. Green was one of the first and best African photographers, who also took advantage of his wealthy father’s connections to secure even more jobs.

Family Life and Education

Jonathan Adagogo Green (commonly known as J. A. Green) was born in 1873 in the village of Ayama, known today as Peterside, in Bonny, Rivers State, Nigeria. He came from a distinguished Ibani (Ijaw) family. His father, Chief Sunju Okoronkwoye Dublin Green, was a prominent figure, and his mother, Madame Idameinye Green, came from the same noble lineage. Following the death of his father in 1875, the young Jonathan was raised by his uncle, Uruasi Dublin Green, who played a significant role in his upbringing and early education.[1]

Green was educated in Lagos and possibly also in Sierra Leone, both of which were important centres for Western-style learning in colonial West Africa. Though the details of his photographic training remain unclear, by 1891, at just 18 years old, he had established a professional photography practice in Bonny.[2]

Over the next 14 years, Green would become a prolific documentarian of life in the Niger Delta. His body of work was diverse and sophisticated, ranging from formal portraits of British colonial officers and European merchants to striking images of local chiefs, their families, community rituals, daily life, architecture, and commerce. His photographs appealed both to local elites, who saw in his images a reflection of their status and identity, and to expatriate clients who wanted visual records of their lives and surroundings.

As the first professional photographer of Nigerian birth, Jonathan Adagogo Green’s works can be seen as an important voice for Nigeria’s early modernist art movement. Moreover, his photography reveals that he was straddling two worlds; one, as an Ibani young man born into an elite trading family, and the other, as the chief photographer for the British as they laid the foundation for the newly formed colony of Nigeria.

Career

Jonathan Adagogo Green studied photography in Sierra Leone before establishing a studio in Bonny in 1891, where he rose to become one of the most prolific and accomplished indigenous photographers active in West Africa.

Green was, without question, Nigeria’s first true Master Photographer and Artist Photographer. His work was more than a profession, it was a calling. He committed himself to the thorough documentation of the political, commercial, industrial, and social life unfolding around him.

With great skill and a deep sense of responsibility, he used photography as a medium to observe and preserve the world he inhabited. As a sensitive and perceptive individual, he captured his environment and its people with care, creating a visual archive for future generations. In both scope and execution, he was a true pioneer in his field.

Jonathan Adagogo Green is also credited with taking the now-famous photograph of Oba Ovonramwen of Benin aboard the naval ship SS Ivy as the monarch was being taken into exile in 1897. The ship was anchored off the Bonny River en route to Calabar, a haunting and historic moment immortalised through Green’s lens.[3]

Jonathan Adagogo Green’s Relationship With the British

At that time, the Ibani Ijaw town of Bonny was at the heart of maritime commerce, with the slave trade at its peak in the 18th Century and the palm oil trade dominating throughout the 19th Century.

Jonathan Adagogo Green’s photographic skills were in great demand, and his business boomed at a time when Bonny functioned as the administrative centre of the protectorate throughout the historical trajectory, putting him at the hub of British imperialist activity.

Green worked closely with British colonial officials, many of whom were among his most frequent clients. He photographed British administrators, military officers, missionaries, merchants, and civil servants stationed across the Niger Delta. His professionalism and the high quality of his work earned him access to important colonial events and official circles, privileges rarely afforded to Africans at the time. Through this collaboration, Green gained the means and opportunities to sustain a successful commercial studio and expand his practice.

British colonial authorities trusted Green to document events and figures of administrative importance. His ability to capture formal portraits and ceremonial occasions with precision and elegance made him a valuable visual recorder of colonial life. Despite his collaboration with the colonial elite, Green did not merely function as a colonial recorder. He also used his position to document African subjects, customs, and community life with a sense of dignity and cultural depth often absent in European representations of Africans. In this way, he walked a delicate line: serving colonial and indigenous interests alike, while subtly reclaiming African self-representation through his lens.

Death and Legacy

Jonathan Adagogo Green’s photographs, many of which are now held in collections across Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States, remain among the earliest visual records of Southern Nigeria during the colonial period.

As a pioneering African photographer, Green’s legacy lies in how he used the camera not simply as a tool of documentation, but as a means of cultural preservation and self-representation. At a time when Africans were often denied the opportunity to shape their own image, Jonathan Adagogo Green offered a powerful and enduring counter-narrative, one that continues to inform how history, identity, and memory are visualised in Nigeria and beyond.

In 1905, Jonathan Adagogo Green’s brilliant 14-year photography career ended with his death. He was just 32. His body lies in an all-marble tomb, imported from Belgium, in Bonny, present-day Rivers State.

Ore Green: West Africa’s First Female Pharmacist

After his death, the British ethnographer, Gwilym Iwan Jones (May 3, 1904 – January 25, 1995), who worked in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria as a colonial officer for 20 years (1926-1946), acquired many of Green’s photographs from one James A. Green (possibly a relative) and continued to reprint the photos until the 1990s.[4]

However, some of Jonathan Adagogo Green’s works are on display in the British Museum to this day, and without his prolific portfolio, there definitely would be huge gaps in Nigeria’s recorded history.

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