Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 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
Notice the hand. The man's right arm is slung along the window rail, wrist loose, and a plain gold band catches the only hard light in the frame. Everything else is soft—the boy's face gone heavy with sleep against the patterned tie, the brown plush of the trotro seats, the city dissolving to amber behind the glass. The ring is the one fact the picture insists on, and it does a quiet, deliberate amount of work.
This is a still image that behaves like a held frame from a film. Carlos Idun-Tawiah builds these tableaux with a cinematographer's patience: the back of the bus is staged as an interior, lit so that two figures emerge from a dim that swallows the standing passengers behind them. Nothing is candid here, and the image is honest about that. It is a constructed scene from "Hero, Father, Friend," the series Idun-Tawiah made after losing his own father at eighteen and finding almost no photographs of the two of them together. So the work is not documentation but its substitute—a picture made to occupy the place where a missing one should be.
What interests me is how little the photograph spends on incident. No gesture, no event, only a weight transferred from one body to the other on a moving vehicle. The title withholds; the image withholds; the affection is routed entirely through posture and that wedding band. Idun-Tawiah, among the most watched of his Ghanaian generation, understands that a photograph can carry tenderness precisely by refusing to announce it—letting the unsaid sit, framed and lit, where it can finally be looked at.
Notice the hand. The man's right arm is slung along the window rail, wrist loose, and a plain gold band catches the only hard light in the frame. Everything else is soft—the boy's face gone heavy with sleep against the patterned tie, the brown plush of the trotro seats, the city dissolving to amber behind the glass. The ring is the one fact the picture insists on, and it does a quiet, deliberate amount of work.
This is a still image that behaves like a held frame from a film. Carlos Idun-Tawiah builds these tableaux with a cinematographer's patience: the back of the bus is staged as an interior, lit so that two figures emerge from a dim that swallows the standing passengers behind them. Nothing is candid here, and the image is honest about that. It is a constructed scene from "Hero, Father, Friend," the series Idun-Tawiah made after losing his own father at eighteen and finding almost no photographs of the two of them together. So the work is not documentation but its substitute—a picture made to occupy the place where a missing one should be.
What interests me is how little the photograph spends on incident. No gesture, no event, only a weight transferred from one body to the other on a moving vehicle. The title withholds; the image withholds; the affection is routed entirely through posture and that wedding band. Idun-Tawiah, among the most watched of his Ghanaian generation, understands that a photograph can carry tenderness precisely by refusing to announce it—letting the unsaid sit, framed and lit, where it can finally be looked at.