Balaclava pulled tight, bone and blue bowties packed cheek to brow. A toughie, squatting low on a busted cement block, hand easy on a gun. Two molten slits peering through the shiesty, and one mean mug.
The shot snaps. Sackitey’s chimeras stop you mid-stride, never what they seem to be. A gangsta who isn’t one. A man who’s no fish, but gloved in golden scales. Zebra brim pulled low, stare locked. Hands up, cricket gloves: less fighter than a four-rope dandy.
Sackitey didn’t set out to make chimeras. He came to photography sideways, almost incidentally, with a mobile phone, a friend’s nudge, and a Business Administration degree in his back pocket. “I wasn’t trying to join an existing tradition,” he says. “I was responding to what felt urgent and visually compelling around me.” What has racked up since is a roster of assembled fictions that sidesteps gender’s agendas — patchwork frames stitched from the afterlives of secondhand cloth, not sweating what the market crowns or tosses out.
“I don’t separate the political from the intuitive,” he adds. “Intuition is already political. It emerges from lived experience, from the body’s negotiation with history and culture.” Wary of anything that walks in loud, he is drawn instead to friction, to places where categories give out, where ducking tags is its own kind of statement. “I trust the material, the accident, the improvisation. Those choices carry critique without needing to be heavy-handed.”
Freedom, he learned, isn’t granted. “You build it by not waiting for permission, by using what you have, and by trusting your intuition before you have the language to justify it.” The same principle applies across everything he does: photographer, stylist, creative director — different hats, one throughline. “Styling affects posture; posture affects framing; framing affects narrative. When I’m choosing materials, I’m already thinking about composition.” Collaborators bring their own spin. “The image becomes a shared construction,” he says. The final call is his.
“You build [freedom] by not waiting for permission, by using what you have, and by trusting your intuition before you have the language to justify it.”
Accra, for its part, takes some credit. “It will always be more than a backdrop,” Sackitey says. “It’s a living archive and a pulse.” Over time, the city recalibrated his eye, shifting it from surface to what lies underneath. Less scenery now, he adds, than collaborator, an atmosphere that taught him to put clearance and couture on the same rack. What started as improvisation found its cut. Accra keeps adjusting the fit. “The city trained my eye to look for potential rather than polish — for beauty that isn’t pristine but negotiated.”
Kantamanto, one of the world’s largest secondhand markets, puts this premise on full display. The North’s castoffs touch down weekly, caught between the lives they’d led and what they might yet become. Traders run the gauntlet, bale after bale, sorting the salvageable from the spent with no end in sight. Sackitey pulls up regularly, combing the market every time a fresh load comes through.
“Kantamanto is alive, improvisational, and relational,” he says. “Even if I enter with a shot in mind, the market always intervenes.” A score from the pile, quick hands, and the bid is already in. “Sometimes the negotiation itself becomes part of the work: the conversation, the humor, the pause while I look through a pile of clothes.” Kantamanto runs its own play. “My role often feels like entering an already ongoing act of transformation rather than initiating one.”
He reaches back to a childhood spent trawling the market’s enormous stalls: the press of the crowd, the density, the thrill of a good jumble. That nostalgia won’t smooth out his politics; it only thickens the case. “Kantamanto isn’t an abstract symbol of waste or sustainability. It’s a livelihood. It pays education fees, rent, offers survival and pride.” That keeps him from the dispassionate takes distance allows: the kind that makes Kantamanto a picturesque backdrop for ecological crisis, or raids it for some rarefied wellspring of awe. Neither lands with someone who dug through those piles as a kid, or who knows the cost of sorting them now.
What the market receives is the fashion industry’s excess. That excess lands in a community that neither produced the overflow nor holds power over the systems driving it. It arrives labeled Obroni W’awu, the dead man’s clothes, coined for the compressed bales shipped from economies that have offloaded both surplus and accountability at the same dock. Where fleeting fads once met the goods at the peak of their desirability, Kantamanto receives the aftermath: worn, marked, wrung out by someone else’s desire.
“Kantamanto isn’t an abstract symbol of waste or sustainability. It’s a livelihood. It pays education fees, rent, offers survival and pride.”
No carol to the FYP factory, no gleeful mimicry of the commodity frenzy. “It’s about what happens after consumption,” Sackitey says, the weight of what’s left behind, the recut’s second life. Any piece in the pile could be its neighbor’s twin, but each still holds its own story. Out of that friction, mass-produced against one-off, overstock against obsolete, a different kind of record starts to form. Sackitey, one of its pattern-cutters, keeps his critique pointed upward, at a global system that builds disposability into design and produces at a scale Kantamanto absorbs without reprieve. He doesn’t moralize about those working within it, which would shift a systemic problem onto those navigating it with skill and wit. “What interests me is agency within constraint. Kantamanto reveals both: the constraint of global overproduction and the agency of local transformation.”
Case in point: a student of his mother’s, a young designer, once had to return his locally-made bags after the distributor stitched Western brand logos onto them. The story towers and topples: brand hierarchy, economic aspiration, a system in which the logo outranks the craftsmanship. The parable is self-delivering. “I try to explore the absurdity of those hierarchies by making glamour from the discarded,” says Sackitey, “and showing how value is constantly being renegotiated.”
That renegotiation shows up in his props. Fleece blankets, red net curtains. “When examined closely, any object can reveal layers of meaning worth exploring,” he says. The oldest prop still in rotation is a creased, many-seasons-deep suit jacket: restaged as costume in one frame, critique in the next. He loves it, but has some disdain for it too. No arbitration in sight; the jacket promises dignity and charges conformity at the door. The list goes on: cloth wig, furry boas, flowers — tender at the bud, vanity at the stem. “These objects keep drawing me back because they refuse completion. They carry contradiction, and in that tension, they remain alive in the frame.” Contradictions don’t depreciate.
Sackitey’s pantheon runs four deep. David LaChapelle cranks the spectacle: constructed sets, symbolism dialed to ten, theatricality maxed out. Viviane Sassen works the flip side: anatomy dealt out in parts, subtext tucked into tone and grain. James Barnor and Seydou Keïta lock it down, grounding the whole production in history and place in a way the other two play off. “Those influences don’t compete; they overlap. What interests me is the conversation between performance and the real.” Fantastical and documentary, political and poetic. It’s Barnor and Keïta he sits closest with — their desire to situate swagger and fantasy in the present tense, neither romanticized nor ironed flat.
That’s what his own images do. His stagings aren’t cut off from the reality that produces them. His subjects aren’t making statements so much as being allowed to take inventive joy seriously, to pick the locks of rigid expectation and pocket the keys. Sackitey tells stories “in the little way” he can: intimate, not contained. An approach that hasn’t changed, even as the images travel further than he imagined they would.
“I have become more attentive to ambiguity,” says Sackitey, “to layering references that cannot be reduced to a single reading.” He doesn’t hand down lessons. “Images alone cannot dismantle entrenched economic or historical structures,” he allows. “What photography can do is interrupt familiarity, complicate dominant narratives, and create a conversation around subjects that would otherwise be ignored. It creates friction in perception rather than immediate structural change.” What remains, he adds, is “experimentation that emerges from necessity.”
Written by: Maria Yigouti
Photographer: Emily Brownett
