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 scene reads at once: a girl on a wooden plank swing, photographed from below against a pale sky, laughing with her whole face, both hands gripping the ropes above her head. She wears a white dress scattered with small appliqued flowers, her hair gathered high. Behind her, soft in the sand and slightly out of focus, two smaller children play near a low hedge. This is the studium, the broad legible field of the image, calm and easily named: a childhood at play on some open ground near the Senegalese coast at the grey end of the day.
But the picture pierces elsewhere. It is the teeth, the wide unguarded laugh caught at full stretch, that reaches out of the frame and holds me, and beside it a second, smaller thing, the thin bracelet on the wrist that grips the rope, an ordinary object the camera has made suddenly and irreversibly precise. These are the wounds of the photograph, its punctum, the points that refuse to dissolve into general meaning and instead simply insist, again and again: this happened, this particular child laughed in exactly this way, once.
Idun-Tawiah photographs from a low angle so that the swing lifts her up into the sky, weightless, at the top of its arc, while the other children stay grounded and blurred, already sliding toward memory. The series is titled around what lies between earth and sky, and here the phrase is not a metaphor but a plain physical fact: a body suspended between the ground it has just left and the air it has briefly won. The staging is deliberate, the period dress precise, and still the laugh escapes all of it, entirely real.