Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 18/5/1997

A girl on a plank swing, both hands up on the ropes, laughing so hard that her whole face has given way to it. She is in a pale dress with a collar and a scatter of small appliquéd flowers, her hair gathered up in a knot, a hoop in one ear, a thin band round the wrist that grips the right-hand rope. The camera sits down at her level, so the ropes run up out of the top of the frame and the sky behind her is a flat pale nothing. Away to the right three children stand about on the sand by a low hedge, out of focus and much too far off to be in on the joke.

You notice fairly quickly that she is the only thing in the picture with any energy in it. The hedge is a smudge. The sky has no weather. The other children have gone soft at the edges and the sand is only sand. Everything has been quietly turned down so that one laugh can be turned up, and it works, which is faintly annoying, because you can see precisely how it was done and it works anyway.

The series is called Memories Between Earth And Sky, and here the title does no metaphorical work whatsoever. She is between them, on a plank, holding two ropes. The photograph is in black and white, which usually means somebody wants the past on your mind, and the strange thing is that it does not feel like the past at all. It feels like four seconds ago. The dress was chosen, the light was waited for, the background was allowed to dissolve. Nobody arranged the laugh, and it is still going.