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
The boy in the foreground is pure silhouette, back to us, a basketball hoisted overhead in both hands as though he means to hurl it at the sky. He is blacked out completely against a sunstruck corner in Saint-Louis, and Idun-Tawiah gives him the whole left half of the frame, a dark cutout of pure intention. Beside him, half-seen, a smaller figure in a headscarf with a backpack waits. The light rakes in low and hard from the right, throwing the ball’s round shadow onto the whitewashed wall.
Across the street, in full sun, a couple in vintage dress walk arm in arm, oblivious: she in a printed dress with a small handbag, he in a dark waistcoat and pale trousers, a picture of grown romance passing the corner where the game is. The composition sets two ages of the same street against each other, the child’s raised ball and the lovers’ linked arms, play and courtship sharing one block of Saint-Louis under the same flare of afternoon. A hand-lettered sign on the building names the telecommunications office; the town is going about its ordinary business.
It is a photograph about foreground and background as two speeds of life, and Idun-Tawiah lets the contrast between the near dark and the far brightness carry all the feeling. The silhouette keeps the boy anonymous, universal, a shape of pure boyhood energy, while the couple stay small and particular in the sunlight beyond. Nothing is spelled out. The ball is up, the lovers are walking, the question of whether we are there yet hangs over both, the child’s impatience and the couple’s slow arrival held in a single well-timed glance.