Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
Four young men gather on a tiled terrace above a harbour, the sea behind them crowded with the slim wooden fishing boats of the Ghanaian coast, dozens riding at anchor toward a grey breakwater and the open Atlantic. Two perch atop stacks of white plastic chairs, backs to us; 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. An ordinary afternoon, arranged so that the ocean is never merely scenery but a proposition placed before them.
The colour is jubilant and pointed: mustard, cobalt, green, a hot red short, a lilac bucket hat, staged with obvious delight against the sun-bleached wall and salt-hazed sky. This is the palette of self-fashioning, style insisted upon as futurity, composed 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 so many along this coast weigh, spoken here by boys with their whole lives folded up in front of them.
The picture holds two horizons in one frame. One is literal, where the anchored boats give way to the deep, the sea that has always been livelihood and leaving for West Africa. The other is temporal, the future these young men try on the way they try on bright clothes. Nobody is in crisis; that is its quiet daring. Idun-Tawiah lets the ocean carry the freight of history while the boys loiter and dress and talk, and in that gap between light mood and heavy sea the image quietly aches.
Four young men gather on a tiled terrace above a harbour, the sea behind them crowded with the slim wooden fishing boats of the Ghanaian coast, dozens riding at anchor toward a grey breakwater and the open Atlantic. Two perch atop stacks of white plastic chairs, backs to us; 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. An ordinary afternoon, arranged so that the ocean is never merely scenery but a proposition placed before them.
The colour is jubilant and pointed: mustard, cobalt, green, a hot red short, a lilac bucket hat, staged with obvious delight against the sun-bleached wall and salt-hazed sky. This is the palette of self-fashioning, style insisted upon as futurity, composed 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 so many along this coast weigh, spoken here by boys with their whole lives folded up in front of them.
The picture holds two horizons in one frame. One is literal, where the anchored boats give way to the deep, the sea that has always been livelihood and leaving for West Africa. The other is temporal, the future these young men try on the way they try on bright clothes. Nobody is in crisis; that is its quiet daring. Idun-Tawiah lets the ocean carry the freight of history while the boys loiter and dress and talk, and in that gap between light mood and heavy sea the image quietly aches.