Indigo Bolt, Mid-Unroll

I found this at a cloth merchant's stall in Cotonou — a bolt of hand-dyed Ankara that had been partially unrolled and left, the top layer bleached pale by a season of open-air display while the inner folds held their original depth. I shot it from directly above with a single shaft of afternoon light raking across the surface so you could read every crease like a contour line. The colour gradient from bone to near-black is not a dye effect. It is time, unspooling.