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
The figure is not in the room. What stands against the flowered wallpaper, hand cocked on one hip, is only the shadow a child throws—a silhouette pressed flat among the framed portraits, the small framed view of a town, the upright piano holding its sheet music in the dark at right. Idun-Tawiah has photographed an absence and let it do the work of a presence. The boy exists here exactly as the people in those frames exist: as image, as trace, as something the light has decided to keep.
This is a photograph thinking about what photographs are for. The pictures on the wall are the household's earlier exposures, its private archive of who came before; the shadow is the newest entry, not yet fixed, still in motion, leaning into a pose it is trying on. Stillness is the medium's native condition, and the picture knows it—the piano silent, the score unplayed, the wallpaper's roses arrested mid-bloom. Everything waits. What looks like a quiet domestic interior is really a meditation on inheritance: a generation rendered as outline, taking its place among the developed.
The restraint is the argument. Idun-Tawiah, whose staged scenes of Ghanaian family life have moved quickly into serious collections, works here at the edge of legibility, trusting a single cast shadow to carry the series' theme of fathers and sons, heroes and friends—roles handed down the way a photograph hands down a face. "9th March," from Hero, Father, Friend, is among his most reticent images and, for that reason, his most exacting.
The figure is not in the room. What stands against the flowered wallpaper, hand cocked on one hip, is only the shadow a child throws—a silhouette pressed flat among the framed portraits, the small framed view of a town, the upright piano holding its sheet music in the dark at right. Idun-Tawiah has photographed an absence and let it do the work of a presence. The boy exists here exactly as the people in those frames exist: as image, as trace, as something the light has decided to keep.
This is a photograph thinking about what photographs are for. The pictures on the wall are the household's earlier exposures, its private archive of who came before; the shadow is the newest entry, not yet fixed, still in motion, leaning into a pose it is trying on. Stillness is the medium's native condition, and the picture knows it—the piano silent, the score unplayed, the wallpaper's roses arrested mid-bloom. Everything waits. What looks like a quiet domestic interior is really a meditation on inheritance: a generation rendered as outline, taking its place among the developed.
The restraint is the argument. Idun-Tawiah, whose staged scenes of Ghanaian family life have moved quickly into serious collections, works here at the edge of legibility, trusting a single cast shadow to carry the series' theme of fathers and sons, heroes and friends—roles handed down the way a photograph hands down a face. "9th March," from Hero, Father, Friend, is among his most reticent images and, for that reason, his most exacting.