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
What one notices first, in black and white, is the tailoring. The man wears a wide-lapelled pinstripe jacket over pale trousers, a boldly diagonal striped tie loosened just enough to read as ease rather than occasion. Beside him the woman is in a gingham shirtdress, sleeves gathered at the elbow, the skirt catching mid-stride, her feet in low striped sandals. Idun-Tawiah dresses his subjects with a costumer’s exactness, but the pleasure of the picture is that the clothes have already been lived in for the length of an afternoon.
They stand with a black bicycle between them, hands resting near its saddle, heads dipped toward each other, both caught laughing at something we are not told. Behind them a plaster wall carries a hand-lettered sign for chicken by the kilo and a phone number, and above that a wall of bougainvillea spills down in a cascade of pale leaf and bloom. The vernacular signage and the flowering vine do the work a studio backdrop cannot: they root this romance in a real street, a real economy, a real Saint-Louis wall.
The intimacy is in the downward glance, that shared looking-away that couples do when a joke is too private to face head-on. Idun-Tawiah has a portraitist’s patience for exactly this register, the un-posed second inside the posed scene. It is a fashion photographer’s image in its love of surface and cut, and a lover’s image in its warmth, and it never asks us to choose between the two.