The resale of Lomè bread

A walk through the silent streets of Lomè after a morning at the market is one of those experiences that is always worth having. A pleasure mixed with veneration in seeing street vendors - almost all of them, I would say - displaying their goods like jewels inside a glass case, an element that increases their value, whatever the goods: a brush, a bucket of paint, of flour or bread. Everyone without distinction "dreams" - some do it with their eyes open, some let themselves go into a deeper sleep.

The baker, the baguette seller, for example, made me wait before finishing her dream. When she woke up, she got up and, without feeling the need to apologize, she asked me if I was French, from Paris. «I miss Paris so much! When I have the money I will go back, and I will open a boulangerie or an epicérie in Goutte d'Or, near Rue des Poissoniers... Is this what you want? Is my dream!" Good woman, I wish you all the luck.

There are also those who, finding themselves in the unpleasant circumstance of having nothing to show, limit themselves to exposing themselves with the only product of those who do not lose heart - that is, a smile - that smile that you will have to repay with a coin and a story, one capable of making him finish his dream.

It makes you wonder, If the powder were a spice, it couldn't help but have this aroma, a special spice that aromatizes the atmosphere and which settles, leaving a light patina like talcum powder, on the natural order of things.

Days later when I looked at the photograph of the Baker of Lomé, I recognized behind her the same sorghum broom present in an 1844 shot taken by the English photographer and naturalist William Henry Fox Talbot: The Open Door. That shot was a conscious attempt to create a photographic image in accordance with the renewed British taste for 17th-century Dutch genre painting.

In his commentary on The Pencil of Nature, where this image appeared as plate 6, Talbot wrote: «We have sufficient authority in the Dutch school of art, to take as subjects of representation scenes of everyday and familiar events. The eye of a painter often lingers where ordinary people see nothing extraordinary."

Luca Periotto

NP Febbraio 2024