James K. Bruce Vanderpuije was one of the pioneers of photography in West Africa and Ghana, the country considered the birthplace of photography in the region. Born into a bourgeois Accra family, he learned photography from the old master J.A.C. Holm and opened his own Déo-Gratias Studio in the Jamestown district of Accra in 1922, aged twenty-three, photographing family portraits, British colonial groups, Indian merchants and the city's Black aristocracy as well as public events. After independence in 1957 he produced advertising campaigns for international companies, leaving his son Isaac, who took over the studio, an archive of glass-plate negatives of unmatched artistic and documentary quality for the colonial period in West Africa.