Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 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
© The Artist
The photograph is built in layers, and Idun-Tawiah refuses to let the eye settle on any single one. Nearest to us, two figures stand in near-total silhouette behind a paned window: a woman with her hair gathered into a low bun, a bag slung from her shoulder, faced by a man whose pale blue shirt is the only garment the light reaches. Their profiles almost touch. Between them and us hangs the glass itself, streaked, holding its own faint reflections, so that the couple reads less as bodies than as shapes cut from the afternoon.
Beyond the mullions lies the studium: a Saint-Louis street rendered in dusty salmon and a single turquoise shutter, the vernacular palette of the town, legible and calm. It is the kind of background one could describe without emotion, a stage set of wall and pavement and light. Idun-Tawiah has composed it with care, but composition alone would leave the image merely handsome, an exercise in colour and screen.
What pierces is smaller and off to the side. A red-and-white parasol tilts over a figure carrying a child; a small orange balloon floats at the right edge, held by a boy barely present. These are the details that wound, in Barthes’s sense, precisely because no one placed them there for meaning. The lovers are the ostensible subject, but the balloon is the punctum, the accidental red that will not stay in its place, that keeps the whole silhouetted tenderness from closing into a symbol and holds it open as something seen.