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
Blue hour on a headland above the water, and the light has gone the colour of a bruise healing. A man in a dark suit stands very still, white cuff showing at the wrist, a thin red stripe surfacing in his tie like the last warm thing in the frame. Against his shoulder a woman leans, hooded, her eyes closed, a small clutch with a metal clasp held loosely at her side. Around them, low and pale, the markers of a cemetery rise from the grass, and past the grass the Atlantic goes on being the Atlantic.
Saint-Louis sits where a river meets that ocean, and the ocean here is never only scenery. It is the water that carried people away and the water they were promised across. To pose two Black lovers among graves, at the edge of that particular sea, is to let history stand just behind tenderness without letting it speak first. Idun-Tawiah keeps the exposure dark, almost withholding, so that the couple must be searched for in their own portrait, the way a name must be searched for on a worn stone.
And yet nothing here is grim. The woman’s face, tilted into the man’s coat, holds something close to peace; the whole picture is quieter than grief, more like the composure that comes after it. The invented past of the series, its imagined mid-century elegance, meets a real geography of loss and does not flinch. Between earth and sky, between the buried and the living, Idun-Tawiah finds a couple who have decided, for the length of one long dusk, simply to stay.