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

A young man in a brown corduroy jacket stands in an open lot holding a child against his chest. He grins straight at the camera. The child faces the other way, arms hooked over his shoulder, head turned in, and hangs there with the whole weight of someone who has stopped holding on for himself. Two cream terry socks dangle at the man's hip, one of them marked pink near the toe. His trousers are a heavy leaf-patterned brocade. Behind them sits a cream bus with a ladder up its back, a boy halfway up it, and a green Ghanaian plate.

The title is Dreams from my Father, and the man is young enough to be nobody's father yet. That is the arrangement. He is playing a part, and the picture reconstructs something the camera arrived too late to record. Photographs are usually asked to prove that a thing happened. This one has been asked to supply a thing that did not, or did not any longer, and it goes about the job with an entirely straight face.

What keeps it off the shelf marked sentimental is the child, who is not acting. The arm over the shoulder has gone slack. The socks have worked loose the way socks do on a body that has grown heavy. Whatever the adults agreed to stage, that weight is real and it is being carried by somebody. Idun-Tawiah has photographed an inheritance rather than a memory, and the difference is the point. A memory belongs to whoever had it. An inheritance can be handed to a person who was not there.