Wana, who was sitting at the back with Martha, leaned forward. ‘Do we only know that because we know the context? Because we know there are gangs? Because we know they begin in the settlements? If all we had was the photo, say we didn’t know where it was from, would we be able to say the same?’

‘Good question,’ Leonard said. ‘It goes to the heart of it. What can photography do? It can’t write history. It isn’t a biography. It’s a moment, that’s all.’

‘Maybe the boys are watching a girl?’ someone suggested.

‘Now that’s an idea. Do we agree? No? Because they would be preening, showing off, if it was to a girl? Good point. Okay, we’re back to the idea of them as alienated from the old man, their elders. Not interested in the camera.’

‘Back to history,’ Wana said. ‘They show us that more than one thing is happening. They remind us.’

‘And that,’ Leonard concluded, ‘is why you should never neglect the edge of the frame, or the edge of your vision. It’s there that something is likely to reveal itself. The thing you overlook. See,’ he said, pointing this time to a woman in the market with a child to her breast. A nice enough shot, but ordinary, commonplace. ‘If you cropped this image.’ His hands were over the print, shifting attention from the woman with the child to the woman behind them with a dollar note tucked into her armband. A small visual shift, a large shift of meaning. He moved on to a photo of a building-site foreman in a hard hat with his arm out in a gesture of authority; above him a young man, barely in focus, precarious and unprotected on a high steel beam. ‘What have you seen? What have you not seen? What are you showing us? What are you neglecting? Go back. Test yourself. Where your eye turns away, look again.’

After the workshop, after the last of the students had shown him their folios, after Wana had left and Martha had returned to the library, Leonard went with Rika to her office. The rain had stopped – one of those interludes when the air was heavy with water and everything seemed to float. On the walkway to her office, students stood aside for them to pass, and there was respect in the gesture. ‘They must admire you greatly,’ Leonard said, though it was for him that they stood aside.

She opened the door to her office. It was a large room, but despite the windows along one side, it was gloomy with the cloud low outside. She opened the slats to let in a movement of air, hot, humid air, and Leonard’s first impulse was to tell her to shut them again, shut out the damp – terrible for the photographs that were pinned on the walls and already curling inwards. Instead, his eye moved slowly across a portrait of her father that was familiar to him, roof lines in Leiden, Nogi’s face, images from the exhibition. And the shot he’d taken of Rika with Janape at the river on the morning she left. Until she looked at it that day with Leonard beside her, Rika had almost ceased to see that it was her and Janape; it’d become a study in light and shade, the two figures a solid structure against the dancing water. It was the last image Leonard recognised. After that, nothing. Rika’s life without him. Aaron. So many of Aaron. At a table, with Somare; holding a megaphone at a rally; beside an old man, water glinting behind them. A short series in a village, near water, carved canoe prows, the woman who’d been at the seminar that morning, Wana, younger then, without glasses.