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
Black and white, close in, the two of them shoulder to shoulder and mugging at us: a man with a full afro and mustache, grinning wide in a plaid flannel robe, beside him a boy in white towelling, chin up, eyes shut in mock concentration. Both faces are lathered, both draw a razor along a cheek, and Idun-Tawiah crops tight enough that shaving becomes a shared performance rather than a chore. A tiled wall and a lace-trimmed rack of folded towels place them squarely in the bathroom, that small theatre where boys first watch men do the things men do.
The photograph runs on mimicry, and it is funny before anything else. The man’s smile is unguarded, teeth and all; the child’s is more studied, the exaggerated pucker of someone imitating an adult’s seriousness and enjoying it too much to hold it. There is nothing on the boy’s face to shave and everyone in the frame knows it, which is the joke and also the tenderness. Idun-Tawiah trusts the gag to carry the weight: razors and foam stand in for a whole apprenticeship in manhood, half in earnest and half in play.
Monochrome pulls the picture toward the family album and the barbershop wall, toward a vernacular of Black masculine grooming the series treats as inheritance rather than vanity. Inside an elegy for a lost father, the mirror-morning ritual becomes the thing a son keeps: not advice, but the muscle memory of a man’s face beside your own, both lathered, both laughing. What the photograph preserves is the ease of it, the way tenderness travels fastest disguised as a game.
Black and white, close in, the two of them shoulder to shoulder and mugging at us: a man with a full afro and mustache, grinning wide in a plaid flannel robe, beside him a boy in white towelling, chin up, eyes shut in mock concentration. Both faces are lathered, both draw a razor along a cheek, and Idun-Tawiah crops tight enough that shaving becomes a shared performance rather than a chore. A tiled wall and a lace-trimmed rack of folded towels place them squarely in the bathroom, that small theatre where boys first watch men do the things men do.
The photograph runs on mimicry, and it is funny before anything else. The man’s smile is unguarded, teeth and all; the child’s is more studied, the exaggerated pucker of someone imitating an adult’s seriousness and enjoying it too much to hold it. There is nothing on the boy’s face to shave and everyone in the frame knows it, which is the joke and also the tenderness. Idun-Tawiah trusts the gag to carry the weight: razors and foam stand in for a whole apprenticeship in manhood, half in earnest and half in play.
Monochrome pulls the picture toward the family album and the barbershop wall, toward a vernacular of Black masculine grooming the series treats as inheritance rather than vanity. Inside an elegy for a lost father, the mirror-morning ritual becomes the thing a son keeps: not advice, but the muscle memory of a man’s face beside your own, both lathered, both laughing. What the photograph preserves is the ease of it, the way tenderness travels fastest disguised as a game.