São Tomé

An island in the Gulf of Guinea. Light, texture, and the traces of colonial time.

São Tomé and Príncipe sits in the Gulf of Guinea, just north of the equator — one of Africa's smallest countries, a former Portuguese colony, and one of the earliest sites of the Atlantic plantation system. The island has a particular quality of light and a particular relationship to time. Things grow over things here. History doesn't announce itself.