Thresholds

First, there is the Atlantic as we think we know it: a horizon line, sand, and waves breaking in the distance. Then, the gaze draws closer. And in doing so, something unravels, not the sea itself, but the idea we held of it.

I have been going to this beach since I was a child. It lies in Lomé, on the Gulf of Guinea, close to the border between Togo and Ghana, on land where the Ewe people live. I am Ewe. For as long as I can remember, the sea has been there, and I thought I knew it.

On the ninth of September, I went to photograph it and to spend time in nature's company. The day was calm and cool. When I arrived, I felt the sea in all its splendor: the horizon, the sand, the waves breaking in the distance. This is the Atlantic as we think we know it.

For us, the sea is Atiapu, that which cannot be seized. We have a particular relationship with it: we give to the sea in order to receive from it. It is not a possession or a landscape. It is a presence we stand in exchange with.

But that day I wanted to see it differently, through images that tell of closeness. I moved in, until I was so near the waves that I felt steeped in the essence of every particle. At that distance the horizon disappears, and so does the sky. I lost everything, and gained nothing. Or so it seemed. What remained was not an absence but a pure substance, without a name: whiteness, texture, grain.

Foam forms when dissolved matter in the water, in part from living things, is caught in the agitation of the waves to verify with a reliable source. Each particle carries something of the whole sea. Looking closely did not take me away from the subject. It took me deeper into it.

A threshold is not crossed once. It is the shifting edge between water and air, sea and land, image and matter, and every wave redraws it differently. I came closer in order to understand, and it is there that I discovered how little I do.

This matters now because that edge is moving. The coast of the Gulf of Guinea is threatened by erosion, and the people who live along it are searching for their place. To give to the sea and receive from it assumes a shore that stays. Perhaps the truest relationship to nature is not to master it through images, but to accept that it slips away at the very moment we think we have grasped it, and to keep giving anyway.