Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 1997

Four young men gather on a tiled terrace above a harbour, and behind them the sea is crowded with the slim wooden fishing boats of the Ghanaian coast, dozens of them riding at anchor toward a grey breakwater and, past that, the open Atlantic. Two of the four perch atop stacks of white plastic chairs, backs to us, looking out; one pulls a yellow sock up his calf with the concentration of a small ceremony. The others stand and sit along the low ochre wall, talking. It is an ordinary afternoon, and it is arranged, in Idun-Tawiah’s hands, so that the ocean is never merely scenery but a proposition placed before them.

The colour is jubilant and pointed at once: mustard, cobalt, green, a hot red short, a lilac bucket hat, green jelly sandals, all of it staged with obvious delight against the sun-bleached wall and the salt-hazed sky. This is the diasporic palette of self-fashioning, the insistence on style as a form of futurity, and Idun-Tawiah composes it with a documentarian’s patience and a stylist’s precision. Yet the title leans on that same water. Greener pastures, bluer oceans: the phrases of departure, of the crossing that so many along this coast weigh, spoken here by boys with their whole lives folded up in front of them.

So the picture holds two horizons in a single frame. One is literal, the line where the anchored boats give way to the deep, the sea that has always been both livelihood and leaving for West Africa. The other is temporal, the future these young men are trying on the way they try on bright clothes. Nobody in the photograph is in crisis; that is the quiet daring of it. Idun-Tawiah lets the ocean carry the freight of history while the boys simply loiter and dress and talk, and in that gap between the light mood and the heavy sea the whole image quietly aches.