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 boy's gingham shirt is the loudest thing in the room — a small red music against the honeyed gloom — and yet he has gone quiet, his chin tipped down toward the open book balanced across his father's knee. The lamp beside them wears its shade at a slight tilt, as though it too were leaning in to listen, and it pours its whole small allowance of light onto the page and onto two faces that have, for the length of a story, forgotten there is anything to be done.
Look at what surrounds them. A teddy bear slumps among a few stacked books; a child's framed letter — a single red T — leans on the dresser; and above, pinned to the floral wallpaper, three drawings: a crowned figure, a rabbit, a heart. These are the artifacts of a household that keeps things, that lets a child's hand stay on the wall. Carlos Idun-Tawiah builds his images this way, set and styled to the last object, so that the room becomes an argument about what a Ghanaian boyhood is permitted to contain.
The title names the father a griot — the West African keeper and teller of lineage — and the photograph takes the claim seriously. The man's tie is still knotted, his striped shirt still creased from the day; the labour has not been edited out. But the work now is transmission: a voice moving across a page into a listening face. Idun-Tawiah, whose staged tableaux of Accra have carried him into international collections while still young, is reaching back to compose the tenderness an archive may have left unphotographed. What he hands forward here is a likeness of Black fatherhood as attention — patient, lit, and unhurried — and an insistence that such an hour deserves to be kept.