The photo was taken in August 2023 along Lake Bosomtwe in the Ashanti region of Ghana. I was holidaying with friends at a resort along the lake. Hours before I took the photo, a fisherman from the community had come by on a wooden raft to harvest fish, young tilapia. Our friend Kelechi and his dogs Whiskey and Simba had also spent time swimming in the water.

The photograph was taken in The Gambia, during a visit to see family and friends. I worked slowly and attentively, often returning to the same spaces, allowing moments to unfold rather than staging them. The image emerged through this process of observation, guided by my interest in impermanence and the subtle tensions between memory and the present.

I captured this portrait of my parents in 2015. My aim was to explore the complexity of relationships and the challenges of communication, while highlighting the attachment and family values of my parent’s generation. During that time, I enjoyed performing in front of the camera, using simple props around the house to stage scenes. I liked to focus on personal narratives, relying on natural light and my DSLR camera.

My images oscillate between a desire to hold onto a particular moment or emotion and more deliberately orchestrated compositions. My work exists in that space between what we see and how we perceive the things we see. They are a way to catalogue experience and show evidence that I have interacted with the world around me.

In my work, I've always had this fascination with what Roland Barthes described as “that has been”—the thing in front of the camera that was, once upon a time, real. Before that experience, I had an intimate interest in the Acacia species and their depiction on the pyramids in the Nile Valley civilization, but also their presence in the city and their integral part of being of that place, so the photograph is a vessel of that interest to some extent.