Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
81.3 x 81.3 cm / 32 x 32 in
81.3 x 81.3 cm / 32 x 32 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 Artist
A man and a small boy sit across a lace-covered table, both in their best dark suits, sharing tea and bread in the flat morning light of a Ghanaian room. Carlos Idun-Tawiah made Broken Bread in Accra in 2024, and it carries the warmth and ceremony that have made him one of the most exciting young voices in African photography, an artist who stages memory as lovingly as any film director.
Every detail has been chosen with a storyteller's care, the floral teapot at the centre, the framed family portraits on the wall, the white lilies, the green-painted floorboards, the boy's polished shoes not quite reaching the floor. The scene feels at once specific and timeless, a Sunday ritual handed down between generations, dignity worn as naturally as the suits. Idun-Tawiah draws on his own upbringing and on the rich visual traditions of West African studio portraiture, building images that celebrate Black tenderness, faith, and family without a flicker of irony. The big bright window floods the pair in soft light, so that an everyday breakfast takes on the hush of something sacred, a small communion between father and son. The faded pink canvas at the left edge, the climbing houseplant, the patterned china all give the room a lived-in warmth, a home with a history behind it rather than a built set.
Still early in his career, he has already been widely published and exhibited, his cinematic, nostalgia-rich pictures drawing fast-growing attention from curators and collectors across the world. Broken Bread is a tender high point of that work, a quiet sacrament of fathers and sons, of inheritance and care, that lingers long after the looking is done.