Between Shores - The Story
A photographic exploration of memory, migration and belonging
Standing on the shore, I look out across the horizon where sea meets sky. In this quiet moment, the ocean and atmosphere seem to speak to me—with questions rather than commands. Why did it take so long to come back?
Almost forty years separate my childhood in Suriname from this moment. Yet standing there, I experienced something I had not expected: a profound sense of belonging. It felt as though I had found paradise—not because the landscape was pristine, but because of the soul of the place, the spirit of its people, and an atmosphere that embraced me like a warm hug. The sky seemed to greet me as an old friend, asking why I had taken so long.
That moment awakened something from my childhood. Alongside the sense of recognition came melancholy and nostalgia for a time more than three decades past. But what remains of a place when our memories of it begin to fade?
Much of what once felt familiar had become indistinct. I know where I lived, where I belonged, and the geography of my early life. But the experience of being there as a child—the atmosphere, the sensations, the feeling of that place—had become increasingly difficult to retrieve.
This became the starting point for Between Shores, my photographic project about memory, migration and belonging. The photographs are not attempts to reconstruct my childhood or to document Suriname as it once was. Nor are they illustrations of memories that I can clearly recall. Instead, photography became a way of approaching this absence of these memories.
I photograph what is present—the light, the water, the vegetation and fragments of the landscape—while searching for something that is no longer visible. The images explore the space between what I know and what I remember, between fact and feeling. Perhaps memory does not return as an image. Perhaps it returns as a sensation: the warmth of light, the movement of air, the density of a landscape, or a feeling of recognition without certainty.
In making Between Shores, I am not trying to reconstruct my personal history. I am searching for the emotional traces of a place that has remained within me, even as my memories of it have faded.
At its core, Between Shores is about the longing for belonging—the desire to recognise home even when we have been displaced from it. The project reflects on migration, identity and the complex relationship between the place we come from and the place where we build our lives. Migration has expanded and enriched my experience, giving me the opportunity to build a life between different worlds. At the same time, it has meant a gradual loss of roots in the place I left behind.
The photographs carry that duality. They hold melancholy and a quiet homesickness, but also recognition and gratitude.
Between Shores occupies the space between two worlds: between memory and forgetting, between what remains and what can no longer be reclaimed. Through this body of fine art photography, I explore how memories of childhood, migration and a sense of home continue to shape who we are—even when those memories have become incomplete.
