Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 1997

A young man stands against a wall of deep olive green, cloth crumpled so its folds catch light like a painted ground. He wears a white ribbed tank top and loose black drawstring trousers; his hair is a soft dark halo, one small stud glinting at his ear. His arms fall behind him, hands hidden, so the body offers itself frontally, unguarded. The studium is legible at once, a portrait of composed masculine grace against a colour chosen to hold the skin. But the punctum arrives lower and to the right.

There, entering from the corner, are white paper flowers on bright green stems, blades and blossoms rising toward the figure’s hip from a woven pot. They are artificial, and their being made rather than grown is exactly the detail that wounds and holds. Idun-Tawiah lets the constructed bloom rhyme with the constructed calm of the pose, so that the whole image confesses its own arrangement. The flowers do not decorate the boy; they interrogate him, asking whether tenderness in a man must always be staged before it can be shown.

The face refuses the smile. The eyes meet the lens with a level, faintly wary steadiness, neither seduction nor challenge, and this reserve is what raises the picture above fashion. That this photograph became an Aperture cover is fitting, for it reads as a thesis about looking: the green surrounds, the white insists, the flowers intrude. Idun-Tawiah composes a still, sculptural quiet in which a Ghanaian youth is granted the frontal dignity photography has too often reserved for other bodies, and grants it without apology.