Let the Little Children Come to Me, Accra, Ghana, 2022
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 127 x 127 cm / 50 x 50 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 hand has found the edge of the great wooden door and is pushing it open. That is the gesture the whole picture turns on: not the running, which we expect of children, but the small authority of a girl's palm against carved oak, deciding that the threshold will be crossed. She is in white lace; her companion, half a step behind, is in pale blue, and between them the dark interior of the Accra church gives way to a wash of grey daylight beyond the frame. We see them from behind. We are not invited to read their faces, only to follow.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah photographs from inside the world he is describing, and the church here is rendered with the patience of someone who has knelt in such places. A cross is incised into the flank of the wooden pew at the left, almost lost in shadow; the floor is laid in pale tile; one girl's heeled sandal lifts off it with the ankle-sock still visible, a child's foot in a grown woman's shoe. These are the textures of a real Sunday, and they belong to his Sunday Special series, the body of work that has carried this young Ghanaian artist's tender archive of Black childhood into wider view.
What stays with me is the refusal of solemnity. The sacred space is not where the children are kept still; it is the room they are running out of, lace lifting, arms raised, toward a light the photograph withholds from us. The picture lets them go first. It trusts that belonging and departure are the same motion, and that the door, once a girl's hand has touched it, was always going to open.
A hand has found the edge of the great wooden door and is pushing it open. That is the gesture the whole picture turns on: not the running, which we expect of children, but the small authority of a girl's palm against carved oak, deciding that the threshold will be crossed. She is in white lace; her companion, half a step behind, is in pale blue, and between them the dark interior of the Accra church gives way to a wash of grey daylight beyond the frame. We see them from behind. We are not invited to read their faces, only to follow.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah photographs from inside the world he is describing, and the church here is rendered with the patience of someone who has knelt in such places. A cross is incised into the flank of the wooden pew at the left, almost lost in shadow; the floor is laid in pale tile; one girl's heeled sandal lifts off it with the ankle-sock still visible, a child's foot in a grown woman's shoe. These are the textures of a real Sunday, and they belong to his Sunday Special series, the body of work that has carried this young Ghanaian artist's tender archive of Black childhood into wider view.
What stays with me is the refusal of solemnity. The sacred space is not where the children are kept still; it is the room they are running out of, lace lifting, arms raised, toward a light the photograph withholds from us. The picture lets them go first. It trusts that belonging and departure are the same motion, and that the door, once a girl's hand has touched it, was always going to open.