Artist

Prince El-Sha Martey

Documentary photographer based in Accra, working in unscripted, observational images of everyday life.

Statement

I am Prince El-Sha Martey, a Ghanaian photographer and visual storyteller based in Accra. My work moves through the everyday, finding in ordinary moments the things that are too familiar to notice and too important to forget. People, places, the quiet rhythms of life shaped by culture, memory, and survival. My approach is documentary but intimate. I do not construct scenes or direct subjects. I observe, wait, and witness. I believe the most honest images are the ones that were already happening before the camera arrived. What draws me in is rarely the dramatic moment. It is the space around it. The pause before someone speaks, the walk between two places, the look that passes between people who know each other well. These are the things that get lost if no one is paying attention. My job is to pay attention. This is part of a broader effort I am building through Agbawe Archives, documenting the neighborhoods, people, and overlooked moments that exist between history and the present. At the heart of it is a simple conviction: everyday life deserves to be seen, preserved, and told with care.

About

Prince El-Sha Martey is a documentary photographer and visual storyteller based in Accra, Ghana. His practice is built on observation rather than direction. He does not stage his subjects or construct a scene ahead of time. Instead, he moves through spaces already in motion, people already living their lives, and waits for the moment that was always going to happen whether or not a camera was there to catch it. That approach shapes everything about how his images read. There is an intimacy to his work that comes from proximity, not performance. His subjects are rarely aware they are being watched in the way a posed photograph demands. What he is after is closer to memory than portraiture. The kind of image that feels like it was pulled from something you already lived through, even if you have never seen the place or the person before. Prince's interest sits in the everyday. The rhythms of coastal life, the quiet exchanges between people who know each other, the in-between spaces that most people walk past without a second look. He treats these as worthy of full attention, not as filler between more obviously significant events. His images ask the viewer to slow down and notice what they usually don't. A hand resting on a shoulder. A conversation caught mid-sentence. The particular quality of light at a specific hour, in a specific place. Culture, memory, and survival run through his work as recurring threads, not as themes he sets out to illustrate but as things that surface naturally when you spend enough time watching people live. He is drawn to what a place holds onto over time and what it lets go of, and to the people who carry both without necessarily naming either. As one of the founding artists at Agbawe Archives, Prince's photography forms part of a larger documentation project centered on Accra's neighborhoods and the people who shape them. His work is grounded in a belief that the ordinary is not a lesser subject. It is the subject. The stories that hold the most truth are often the ones nobody thought to record, until someone finally paid enough attention to notice they were happening at all.

Works in the archive