Selected Work From Nobody Owns the Atlantic (2024-Ongoing)

“A Ghanaian friend explained to me that he can tell which exact region someone is from, simply by their gait or the shape of their skull. Arriving for the first time at my apartment rental in Accra, he declared from halfway down the road that the young man opening the gate was not a Ghanaian. As he said this, the man was just a thumb sized shadow in our line of sight. However, when we arrived, he revealed himself to be a Fulani from Benin who moved to Ghana with his mother as a young adult. My friend claimed to have clocked him as an outsider, from the stance of his feet as he held the gate. It being my very first time on the African continent, I wrote then that I wondered what it must be like to have that kind of immediate legibility of where one does or doesn’t originate.

There’s a common sentiment within the photographic community of taking your camera with you absolutely everywhere. In her monograph, Catherine Opie recounts how a mentor had her photograph 5 full rolls of film every single single day for over a year. To move with a camera in that way, harvesting that amount of images of a community environment, requires either a sense of belonging to that community or a sense of entitlement to it.  I borrowed Opie’s approach at the start of this project, carrying my camera around with me everywhere, in order to process the buildings and landscapes that I encountered. However, soon into the project, my camera and I had two confrontations with Ghanaian locals, which made me rethink my approach. In both instances, I was photographing landscape images of the Atlantic Ocean and was challenged by someone nearby about who I was, why I was photographing their country, and what I intended to do with the images. I heard the word “obroni” used towards me for the first time. “Obroni” is a Fante word utilized to describe foreigners and diasporans, with an etymology tracing to both “white man” and “slave.”

Since these encounters, my camera itself has also transitioned from being simply the medium that I’m working through, into an independent actor in its own right. The camera arrives into my palm with its own history, its own ethical questions and geography mapped out long before me. In the time since, I’ve started to unpack the layers underneath these interactions through conversations with Ghanaian and diasporan friends. There’s a long intellectual history of Black diasporans, returning to Ghana in search of an ancestral homeland, and not receiving the welcome that they had hoped for. For me, traveling with my camera has expedited questions of power, privilege, and belonging on the continent and its rippling diaspora.”