Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
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
© The Artist
A woman leans far out over a balcony rail in Saint-Louis, one arm extended, palm open, a beaded bracelet at her wrist and a ring catching the sun. She wears a cream blouse dotted with pale blue and a warm ochre skirt; a pearl swings from her ear. Down in the empty street below, tiny against the tarmac and his own long shadow, a man in a light shirt has thrown his arm up toward her. The whole depth of the frame, three storeys and half a block, is the distance between two people saying goodbye.
You could stare at this for a while and still not settle whether it is departure or reprieve. The title, Until Soon, tips toward the former, and the emptiness of the street, that lovely hush of a colonial town at midday, palms and a mosque minaret dissolving into sea-light at the far end, makes the parting feel enormous, as if the two of them were the last people in it. Idun-Tawiah shoots down the diagonal of pastel facades, salmon and butter and faded green, letting the architecture become a chute that funnels the eye from her reaching hand to his.
What gets me is the hand. Photographs of longing usually give us faces; here the woman’s is turned away, in profile and shadow, and everything is loaded instead onto that outstretched arm over the balustrade. It is a gesture caught a half-second before it means anything final, the wave that is also, almost, a way of holding on. Idun-Tawiah stages the vintage romance of the Memories Between Earth And Sky chapter without letting it curdle, because the ache here is structural, built into the sheer physical gap the picture refuses to close.