Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 61 x 76.2 cm / 24 x 30 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
A yellow pencil is clamped between one boy's teeth, freeing both his hands for the open textbook on his lap. It is the smallest gesture in the frame and the one that holds it together: a body improvising around the work it has been told to do. Beside him, a second boy reads with a tie still knotted at his throat, his loafers polished, his white socks pulled high in the heat. The uniform insists on order. The light, falling rust and ochre across the doorway, insists on something warmer and harder to name.
Then the eye drops to the left, where a third boy has folded entirely over his books, head buried in his arms, slumped atop what looks like an old television set pressed into service as a stool. He is the title made flesh — taya man no be lazy man, the tired one is not the idle one. Carlos Idun-Tawiah lets exhaustion sit in the same frame as diligence and refuses to rank them. To study here is to be watched studying, and the picture watches with tenderness rather than judgment, granting these Accra schoolboys the right to be both ambitious and worn out.
From the series boys will be boys, this is Idun-Tawiah at his most quietly exact, a young Ghanaian photographer reframing how African boyhood is seen — not as spectacle but as ordinary, interior, ongoing. The red-painted posts, the courtyard chairs, the long afternoon shadow: a stage set only in the sense that every life is staged by its surroundings. What stays with me is how little is asked of these boys to make them matter, and how much they are given back.
A yellow pencil is clamped between one boy's teeth, freeing both his hands for the open textbook on his lap. It is the smallest gesture in the frame and the one that holds it together: a body improvising around the work it has been told to do. Beside him, a second boy reads with a tie still knotted at his throat, his loafers polished, his white socks pulled high in the heat. The uniform insists on order. The light, falling rust and ochre across the doorway, insists on something warmer and harder to name.
Then the eye drops to the left, where a third boy has folded entirely over his books, head buried in his arms, slumped atop what looks like an old television set pressed into service as a stool. He is the title made flesh — taya man no be lazy man, the tired one is not the idle one. Carlos Idun-Tawiah lets exhaustion sit in the same frame as diligence and refuses to rank them. To study here is to be watched studying, and the picture watches with tenderness rather than judgment, granting these Accra schoolboys the right to be both ambitious and worn out.
From the series boys will be boys, this is Idun-Tawiah at his most quietly exact, a young Ghanaian photographer reframing how African boyhood is seen — not as spectacle but as ordinary, interior, ongoing. The red-painted posts, the courtyard chairs, the long afternoon shadow: a stage set only in the sense that every life is staged by its surroundings. What stays with me is how little is asked of these boys to make them matter, and how much they are given back.