Series: Sunday Special.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
127 x 91.4 cm / 50 x 36 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 young man bows over an open book with his palms pressed flat together, fingertips at his lips, his eyes closed. The light is parsimonious, almost devotional in its own right: it reaches his face, his joined hands, the ruled page, and abandons the rest to amber and black. A pinstriped sleeve, a clerical collar, certificates hung in the dark, a rotary telephone half-melting in the foreground. On the left, a rosary lies across a stack of blue clothbound books, its small silver crucifix already slipping toward the floor, as if grace were a thing one could lose by inches.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah was born in Accra in 1996, and he has made it his work to reconstruct Black domestic and devotional life across Ghana, not as nostalgia but as a careful act of return. The light here remembers seventeenth-century European painting, yet what it falls upon is wholly West African and wholly now. I keep coming back to the question the picture poses without asking it: who do we permit to be seen in the attitude of the sacred, and on what terms. Here the answer is unhurried. Prayer is given back to the man who prays — concentration, not performance.
The image withholds spectacle, and in that restraint there is a kind of tenderness. It honors the daily, repeated labor by which a household and a faith hold together. Printed at scale on Dibond, in an edition of three, the shadow acquires real depth, and the eye obeys the light to its one destination: those folded hands, held an inch from speech, on the verge of becoming a word.