Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
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 picture is organized around a single wooden utility pole, weathered and knotted, that rises through the exact center of the frame and splits it cleanly in two. On the left, a man in a dark suit and narrow-brimmed fedora stands with his back to us, one arm thrown out to point down a street where a pale sedan waits at the corner. On the right, two women in floral lace dresses press together, one folding the other into an embrace, faces turned away toward the light. The pole is not a flaw in the composition; it is the composition, the vertical hinge on which one gesture answers another across the gap.
Idun-Tawiah shoots into a hard, high sun that empties the colonial facades of Saint Louis to chalk and reduces his figures nearly to silhouette. What survives the exposure is edge and outline: the crisp brim of the hat, the pointing hand held flat and dark against the bright wall behind it, the daisy pattern of a dress reading as pure black-and-white incident. A satellite dish and a loose net of telephone wires ride the top of the frame. Detail has been traded for shape, and the trade is deliberate; the eye is given contour to follow rather than faces to read.
Everything hangs on a withheld moment. The man points, but we are never shown what he points at; the women lean away from him, absorbed in their own small circuit of contact. The frame holds two vectors that decline to meet, and the tension between them is the whole subject. Nothing is narrated and nothing is resolved, and that refusal is precisely what keeps the photograph alive on the wall. It remains a fact about looking, about how a street corner can arrange strangers into a shape, rather than a story we are meant to finish for it.