Greener Pastures: The House I First Called Home

By Oyedele Alokan

Migration often begins as a dream of distance, but in Adanu Emmanuel Okoko’s Greener Pastures, it becomes a quiet ritual of endurance. Through four self-portraits, Okoko transforms the ordinary rhythms of immigrant life in the first world into a visual psalm of labour, loss, and belonging.

The series opens with Spilled Beginnings, a simple coffee cup tipping its dark contents across a chopping board. Yet in that spill lies a thesis on displacement: ambition meeting accident, discipline slipping against circumstance. The coffee bleeds like ink on an unfinished letter from home reaching across oceans. Okoko’s still life becomes autobiography, a meditation on how every day abroad begins with both intention and uncertainty.

The series then moves to The Chase, which erupts in motion. The artist is mid-stride, breath folding into the morning cold, running toward a red bus, that mechanical metronome of survival. Above him, birds lift in effortless geometry, free of timetables. The contrast is searing: man bound to schedules, birds to instinct. It is the parable of migration in one frame, showing the endless sprint to belong in a system that rarely waits. Okoko captures velocity as vulnerability and urgency as faith.

Clouds Gather follows, and with it, the ache of arrival. Seated before a modest house, the artist lowers his gaze while dusk presses against the walls. The taped window, the quiet paint, the weary posture; each detail murmurs of temporary shelter. Home becomes both haven and hesitation. The clouds are literal, but they are also interior weather: the condensation of doubt after long effort. Okoko’s palette turns inward, the colours fading into contemplation. It is the stillness after pursuit, the pause where loneliness sharpens into awareness.

The final image, A Toast to My Ancestors, is an act of release. In an open field, liquor pours to the soil as the sun leans westward. What might have been despair becomes devotion. The gesture bridges continents as the libation of a son remembering the ground that made him. Migration ends not in escape but in gratitude. Through this ritual, Okoko closes the circle between departure and return, modern fatigue and ancestral resilience.

Across the series, light performs as theology. It sculpts fatigue into grace and frames solitude with tenderness. The compositions bear the discipline of someone trained in both fine art photographic precision and emotional restraint. Okoko’s series is honest, overcast, quietly luminous as his visual language converses with melancholic humanism, yet his syntax is unmistakably his own.

What makes Greener Pastures compelling is its refusal to dramatize exile. There are no loud gestures of victimhood, no tidy resolutions. Instead, Okoko offers a vocabulary of endurance through cups, buses, clouds, soil which are ordinary objects transfigured into metaphors of persistence. He photographs not the spectacle of migration but its pulse: the private rituals that sustain life and identity.

In the end, Greener Pastures is less a chronicle of relocation than a hymn to continuity. The house he first called home becomes a reliquary of memory; the field, a cathedral of return. Through exhaustion, longing, and grace, Okoko discovers that to leave home is also to carry it.

Greener Pastures: The House I First Called Home is a groundbreaking work as it simplifies a complex topic into four visual images, each profound and resonant, creating a concise yet monumental exploration of migration, memory, and belonging. Through this series, Adanu Emmanuel Okoko asserts himself as a voice to reckon with in the new generation of fine art photographers, demonstrating that personal history can be transfigured into universal reflection with elegance, intelligence, and emotional precision.