Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 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 room is dark in the way rooms are dark before an eye adjusts, and then the light picks out what matters: a boy’s bare shoulder, the white of his singlet, the barber’s hands at work above him. This is a black and white made in Accra, in a room that doubles as a barbershop, and it carries the grain and the deep shadow of interiors lit by whatever comes through a doorway. High on the wall hangs a framed Christ, hands together, and beneath the image the words CHRIST IS THE HEAD OF THIS HOUSE. The barber, an older man in a striped shirt and an apron heavy with pockets, bends to the boy’s head with clippers.
To the left, half swallowed by darkness, three younger children wait on the floor. One girl has her hands pressed together and her face open in a wide grin, delighted by something we cannot hear. The others lean into one another the way siblings do when the wait is long and the room is small. Idun-Tawiah lets the periphery stay dim and unresolved, so that the composition breathes between the lit ritual at the right and the shadowed audience at the left, between the boy submitting to the blade and the children who will submit to it in turn.
A haircut is one of the small liturgies of Black boyhood, an inheritance passed from older hands to younger heads, and the picture treats it with the gravity of a rite. The stacked buckets, the curtained wall, the devotional print are the furniture of an ordinary life lived under a particular sky, and the elder cutting the child’s hair stands in, here, for every man who has ever steadied a son to make him presentable to the world. The photograph does not raise its voice. It simply keeps watch over a house where care is the head, and lets the darkness hold the rest.