Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 50.8 x 40.6 cm / 20 x 16 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
The picture is built from two heads and a fall of black velvet, almost nothing else. Idun-Tawiah sets the elder figure upright at the back, one arm folded down onto the shoulder of the seated younger man, so the composition reads as a shallow diagonal descending left to right. Behind them the drapery is less a backdrop than a second subject: its vertical folds catch a raking light and organise the frame into soft columns, against which the two clear faces become the only fixed points. What the photograph says about kinship it states first as geometry.
The clothes do the formal work. The standing figure wears a striped knit tank over a white shirt and tie, its diamond motif dropping to a point at the sternum; the seated one wears a finer pinstriped vest, a checked tie, sleeves pushed to the forearm, and a hardbound book braced across one knee, the words Heaven & Hell just legible on the spine. The bold stripe set against the fine one keeps the pair from collapsing into a single silhouette: the photograph insists on two people, not one doubled.
What makes the image hold is the plainness of the looking. Both men return the lens directly, without performance, and the black ground gives their gaze nowhere to escape to. Stripped of setting, the Sunday finery becomes pure fact, and the elder’s steadying hand becomes the whole narrative. Idun-Tawiah has found, in a drape and two young men in their best, a durable picture about what seniority means between brothers.
The picture is built from two heads and a fall of black velvet, almost nothing else. Idun-Tawiah sets the elder figure upright at the back, one arm folded down onto the shoulder of the seated younger man, so the composition reads as a shallow diagonal descending left to right. Behind them the drapery is less a backdrop than a second subject: its vertical folds catch a raking light and organise the frame into soft columns, against which the two clear faces become the only fixed points. What the photograph says about kinship it states first as geometry.
The clothes do the formal work. The standing figure wears a striped knit tank over a white shirt and tie, its diamond motif dropping to a point at the sternum; the seated one wears a finer pinstriped vest, a checked tie, sleeves pushed to the forearm, and a hardbound book braced across one knee, the words Heaven & Hell just legible on the spine. The bold stripe set against the fine one keeps the pair from collapsing into a single silhouette: the photograph insists on two people, not one doubled.
What makes the image hold is the plainness of the looking. Both men return the lens directly, without performance, and the black ground gives their gaze nowhere to escape to. Stripped of setting, the Sunday finery becomes pure fact, and the elder’s steadying hand becomes the whole narrative. Idun-Tawiah has found, in a drape and two young men in their best, a durable picture about what seniority means between brothers.