sean Kweifio-okai, ROYAL (BLACK & WHITE 2026)

ROYAL is a photographic exploration of identity and resilience centred on a community of Okada riders and their motorcycles in Jamestown, Accra. Working through a documentary approach, the project follows how these riders operate as an informal yet essential network, sustaining the movement of people and goods across the city. Their daily routes through Accra’s markets trace an invisible cartography, revealing how the city is encountered and navigated in practice. Set within a rapidly transforming urban landscape, the riders move through shifting conditions that shape how the city is lived and understood. Within this, they cultivate their own forms of value and self-expression. Although the Okada economy exists beyond formal governance structures, it sustains a social order grounded in trust and a shared attachment to the motorbike, often personalised as a marker of belonging. In this space of informality, ROYAL offers a close, lived perspective on how identity is negotiated through adaptation to the uncertainties that structure everyday life in the city.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.