The Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker Carlos Idun-Tawiah recreates, through staged portraits, the love story of his parents, rescuing the fragile memories of a relationship that left barely any images behind. The project Memories Between Earth and Sky seeks to push the boundaries of photography.
What happens when photography not only documents but also reimagines? Memories Between Earth and Sky is a collaborative body of work created together with my mother. Through fictional portraits of lovers and friends, this series imagines her love story with my late father, from their first meeting to their final farewell. The work resists erasure: it is an attempt to make visible the fragile memories of a love that was, for the most part, never photographed.
“While developing this series, I often reflected on how forensic sketch artists reconstruct a face or a moment from witnesses’ accounts. Here, my mother is the witness to her own love story, and I translate her memories into images. This process allows me to expand the limits of photography, shifting the story and transforming memory and emotion into something tangible.
Some images emerge from reinvented family photographs, recreated with sitters wearing vintage clothing and using belongings my parents held on to. By placing these everyday objects at the center, I approach their love not as a case to be deciphered, but as a living presence. I step away from grand romantic clichés to celebrate the ordinary, friendship, and the domestic: the quiet architecture that upholds intimacy, family, and our shared humanity.
With Memories Between Earth and Sky, I invite viewers to glimpse echoes of their own stories in these imagined photographs. The project embodies my desire to use photography as a vessel for faith, hope, and love. If I can reimagine my family’s lost archive in a way that feels universal, then perhaps I have also reimagined everyone else’s.”
Carlos Idun-Tawiah
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