Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
83.8 x 127 cm / 33 x 50 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
It is the blue hour in Accra, and Idun-Tawiah has turned his figures into silhouettes. Five of them, a taller youth in a jersey numbered 1 and four smaller children, gather on a concrete forecourt while a soccer ball rises against a sky still holding a pale, early moon. To the right a boy lifts both arms to catch or throw a second ball; the older one holds a third at his hip. Behind them a low painted wall, a lit bus window glowing amber, the muted machinery of a city closing its day.
The dark comes for the details first. Faces go, then hands, then the borders between one body and the next, until what remains is posture, the grammar of children at play written in shape alone. This is a familiar move in the Hero, Father, Friend series, where Idun-Tawiah grieves and reconstructs a father through the language of Black boyhood in Ghana. Here the elegy is oblique: no father is named, only the tall figure who shepherds the smaller ones, a stand-in for every presence that once stood between a child and the falling night.
What lingers is the moon, so faint it could be a smudge on the negative, and the ball suspended near it, two pale circles in a darkening field, the celestial and the ordinary made briefly the same size by distance and dusk. Idun-Tawiah resists sentiment by keeping his camera low, at a child’s height, so the sky enlarges and the players shrink. The photograph does not tell us the game will end well or badly. It only says that some evenings the light leaves slowly enough for us to see who we were together before it goes.