The Grass is Greener Where my Father is, Accra, Ghana, 2024
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 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 small wire basket of practice balls sits in the grass at the centre of the frame, and it is the giveaway. This is not a photograph caught between strokes; it is a scene assembled around that basket, the way a director blocks a stage. The father bends into his putt at dead centre, the yellow flag rises to his right like a marker on a set, and the boys are arranged in a deliberate frieze — one tending the red cart at left, two more kneeling and crouched at the hole. Carlos Idun-Tawiah composes the green as a tableau, the whole horizontal sweep of mown grass functioning less as a place than as a backdrop he has dressed.
What the staging does is reframe a genre. Golf, with its inherited codes of exclusivity and whiteness, is here restaged as a theatre of Ghanaian fatherhood and inheritance. The crisp monochrome uniforms read as costume; the elevated, slightly aerial vantage flattens the players into a deliberate diagram of attention, every gaze converging on the father's hands. This is the constructed image working exactly as contemporary practice asks it to — a built picture that quotes a familiar register in order to claim it.
The work belongs to Idun-Tawiah's series Hero, father, son, the project that has positioned this young Ghanaian artist among the most articulate of a generation rethinking the staged portrait across the African diaspora. The title — The Grass is Greener Where my Father is — converts a cliché into a thesis, and the photograph makes good on it: the field is greenest precisely where the man stands, and where the boys are learning to stand next.
A small wire basket of practice balls sits in the grass at the centre of the frame, and it is the giveaway. This is not a photograph caught between strokes; it is a scene assembled around that basket, the way a director blocks a stage. The father bends into his putt at dead centre, the yellow flag rises to his right like a marker on a set, and the boys are arranged in a deliberate frieze — one tending the red cart at left, two more kneeling and crouched at the hole. Carlos Idun-Tawiah composes the green as a tableau, the whole horizontal sweep of mown grass functioning less as a place than as a backdrop he has dressed.
What the staging does is reframe a genre. Golf, with its inherited codes of exclusivity and whiteness, is here restaged as a theatre of Ghanaian fatherhood and inheritance. The crisp monochrome uniforms read as costume; the elevated, slightly aerial vantage flattens the players into a deliberate diagram of attention, every gaze converging on the father's hands. This is the constructed image working exactly as contemporary practice asks it to — a built picture that quotes a familiar register in order to claim it.
The work belongs to Idun-Tawiah's series Hero, father, son, the project that has positioned this young Ghanaian artist among the most articulate of a generation rethinking the staged portrait across the African diaspora. The title — The Grass is Greener Where my Father is — converts a cliché into a thesis, and the photograph makes good on it: the field is greenest precisely where the man stands, and where the boys are learning to stand next.