Refusing the narratives usually fixed to African subjects, Patricia Reyes made Atlantic Ocean Twilight along The Gambia’s Atlantic coast, a set of beach portraits built on presence, movement and joy.
For a year Reyes lived on the Atlantic shore of The Gambia, and this series comes out of that time. The people in it belong to the beach as the day turns over into night: horse riders, families and the crowds who come down to the water.
Reyes wants pictures that move past the narratives usually attached to African subjects, refusing the familiar frame of hardship. She photographs people through presence, movement, style and joy, and treats each image as something made together rather than taken. “The individuals in these photographs are not passive subjects but active participants, co-creating the images with me through trust, collaboration, and shared curiosity,” she says.
The series also takes in the Kankurang, a masked figure from Manding tradition who appears in the initiation rite that carries young people into adulthood and traditional knowledge. Reyes dates this photograph to 2023. “The central figure in Kankurang is a protective spirit, represented by a masked man,” she writes. By her account the masked spirit keeps order and justice and drives out evil.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, Reyes was raised in Stockholm and now works between that city and New York. Of Afro-Latin descent, she moves across fashion, beauty and documentary work, carrying a Scandinavian plainness and the fuller register of her Latin background into the same pictures. Growing up between cultures and languages shaped how she sees, and her photography sets out to preserve stories, work through questions of belonging, and push against dominant structures of power.
