Between Liberia and elsewhere
This project began as a quiet return to Liberia, to my family’s history, and to the places where memory continues to live long after conflict and displacement. I investigate how personal and national histories intersect, persist, and shape daily life. The work moves between family portraits, domestic interiors, landscapes, and sites of institutional power, tracing how memory is carried not only through stories but also through space, labor, belief, and presence. My connection to Liberia, as a second-generation Liberian-American, has always been complex. The Liberian civil war and its aftermath shaped the oral histories, traditions, and family memories I grew up with. Conversations, silences, and fragments of personal archives have passed down much of what I know about the country. My photography allows me to sit with those fragments, slow down, and look closely at what remains.
The artwork showcases locations such as family homes in Grand Bassa, coastal towns such as Fanti-T own, and structures associated with politics and public life. I don’t take pictures of these places as symbols; I take pictures of them as witnesses. They hold evidence of belief, control, resilience, and survival. Concrete buildings, inherited interiors, and everyday landscapes become sites where history settles quietly, shaping how people move through the world long after major events have passed.
These images challenge the notion that only significant stories or visible trauma shape history. Instead, they focus on stillness, work, and closeness as important ways to remember history. My approach to image-making is slow and relational. I’m interested in observation rather than spectacle, and in the subtle ways power and displacement appear in the ordinary. I’m interested in how power and displacement manifest in everyday life in subtle ways. Instead of writing about times of crisis, I write about what comes after: the places people still live in, the routines that go on, and the quiet work that keeps life going.
Finally, this project is about responsibility and care for inherited histories, family and place, and the act of remembering itself. Photography becomes a way to preserve what remains: visible and invisible traces of power, displacement, belief, and resilience. The project seeks presence rather than resolution, allowing memory to remain complex, layered, and alive.
Grace Tenneh Kromah (b. 1997, Philadelphia) is a Black Liberian American visual artist based in Chicago. Working with analogue and digital photography, family archives and writing, she explores memory, migration and the intersections of personal and national histories. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including My Body is Dust at Asylum Chapel, London (2026), Me Importas Tú at The Martin (2023), and at SITE Gallery (2018). She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020 and is a recipient of the Museum of Contemporary Photography Community Engagement Fellowship and the Filter Photo Fellowship.