Dear Donald,

Seeking, in this sense, is a way of staying with what is incomplete. I feel a duty to share the work of a man I have never met. It is not a new phenomenon. This duty is both familial and cultural. 

Through Seeking Donald, I meet you in pieces of what you pointed your camera towards. In what you decided to keep. I know you only through photographs. I came across your work during a trip to Accra, through my uncle Tony (your son). The album was slightly worn, tattered, and kept together in its original binding. A book of black sheets. Many of the images protected by yellowed sheets. Finding the album is encountering a life that had been quietly waiting to be seen again. 

Some places are recognisable. Others remain uncertain. I know Paris. I see Gare de Lyon. I know Germany. I believe Switzerland too. Bern. But many locations now exist only within your image itself. What once had a name is now held only by colour, or lack thereof.

I see smiling, friends leaning into one another. I see parties, meals, many cigarettes. Bottles. Travel. Demonstrations. Moments on trains. Afternoons in parks, and nights indoors. I see intimacy and public life sitting side by side. I see evidence of movement across borders, across cultures, across social worlds.

Much of what surrounds the images that remain disappears. Many of the people in these photographs are unnamed. Beyond an estimated date range in the 1960s and 1970s, much of the context has been lost. There are no captions. Few notes. Little explanation. This gap, between what is visible and what is known, gives rise to Seeking Donald.

Seeking Donald begins as an attempt to sit with what is incomplete, to acknowledge what has been lost, and to ask whether some of it might still be found. In this way, the title carries a dual meaning. 

I am seeking the photographer (you) — trying to understand who you are through what you choose to photograph and keep. I am also seeking the people you kept — their names, their families, their descendants. 

As I look through the album, I find myself asking small, human questions.

What do you drink?

What do you smoke, and how often?

What music fills these rooms?

Who are these friends?

What kind of nights are these?

What conversations happen just outside the frame?

Pending answers, asking them brings you closer because I wonder on what we would agree. I wonder about your worldview. Your politics. Your thoughts on the Cold War. On independence and empire. On the world you were moving through as you made these images.

I think, too, about what it costs to make work. About the quiet tax the creative mind pays in order to keep: looking, noticing, recording. 

In remembering you this way, I realise I hope someone might one day remember me and my everyday with the same attention. Not because of a finished vision, but because I tried to see plainly. Because I kept making, even when exhaustion feels perpetual. 

Seeking Donald has occupied my mind during a period when I have had little capacity for much else. It has stayed with me through rest, recovery, and pauses where other work does not. Releasing it feels necessary — a way of clearing space, of closing one chapter so another might begin. Releasing it, too, reminds me why I started making in the first place: not because I had to, but simply because I could. Many have told me, I am at a point where I must revisit my why.  

Sharing these images publicly is, in practice, a simple act. It is a chance for someone to recognise a face and preserve an identity. To discover that someone they know also existed in this particular way, at this particular time that merges with my own.

Seeking Donald is, in part, my way of saying: I remember you. And it is my way of asking others to help remember more clearly. In doing so, you contribute to my understanding of inheritance. And too, your own.

If you recognise a face, please get in touch. 

@seekingdonald

Amanda Boachie