Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 18/5/1997

A man in a grey pinstripe suit has fallen asleep sitting upright in a railway carriage. On his lap, a black briefcase. On the briefcase, a small child, face down and also asleep, one striped sleeve flung across the lid and the hand open. His own hands rest on the case at either side of the child, a wedding ring on one, a watch on the wrist. The wall behind his head is the colour of weak tea and carries taped clippings, a footballer in yellow with both arms up, a chalked 92 and 93. Down the carriage a woman stands with her back to us and a man in a straw hat laughs at something outside.

He is dressed for somewhere. The suit, the tie, the shine on all of it sit oddly in a carriage worn back to its metal, and that gap is where the picture lives. Somebody put on his good clothes, collected a child and got on a train. Now the good clothes are creased under a sleeping body, and he has gone under himself, in public, two metres from strangers who are laughing. The briefcase is doing the work of a bed.

Children sleep face down like that only where they are entirely sure of the ground beneath them, and the photograph is built around that certainty. Everything else in the frame is temporary. The clippings are taped, the chalk will be wiped, the seats outlived their colour years ago, and the train is between one station and the next. The solid thing is a man with a case on his knees and a child asleep on top of it. Idun-Tawiah calls the series Hero, Father, Friend, which is three words for one person and a fair description of what is going on here.