Series: Sunday Special.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 2
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
The flash reflector fills the centre of the frame like a small silver sun, its circular bowl turned outward to meet us, so that the boy who lifts the Brownie Hawkeye to his eye is half-eclipsed by his own equipment. We are positioned exactly where the picture he is about to take would land — caught in the act of being photographed by a photograph. It is a precise piece of staging: the camera names itself across its faceplate, BROWNIE HAWKEYE, the cheap Bakelite box that once put image-making into ordinary hands, and Idun-Tawiah lets that lettering do the work of dating and democratising the scene at once.
Everything here is constructed to look found. The pale tailored suit, the soft Gothic arcade dissolving behind into greys, the studied symmetry of two hands bracing camera and flash — this is tableau in the contemporary mode, a memory rebuilt rather than recorded. The image belongs to his "Sunday Special" project, in which streetcast figures in Accra perform the roles of a remembered Ghanaian childhood, and it folds the apparatus of family photography back into the picture so that the subject is also an author. Withholding the face is the move that makes it: identity is deferred onto the instrument, and remembering becomes something done with a machine.
What positions Idun-Tawiah among the most watched younger photographers working out of West Africa is exactly this fluency — the way a vernacular object and a staged gesture are made to carry an argument about who gets to hold the camera. The reflector throws our own looking back at us, polite and unanswerable.