Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
127 x 127 cm / 50 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
The figure is not in the room. What stands against the flowered wallpaper, hand cocked on one hip, is only the shadow a child throws—a silhouette pressed flat among the framed portraits, the small framed view of a town, the upright piano holding its sheet music in the dark at right. Idun-Tawiah has photographed an absence and let it do the work of a presence. The boy exists here exactly as the people in those frames exist: as image, as trace, as something the light has decided to keep.
This is a photograph thinking about what photographs are for. The pictures on the wall are the household's earlier exposures, its private archive of who came before; the shadow is the newest entry, not yet fixed, still in motion, leaning into a pose it is trying on. Stillness is the medium's native condition, and the picture knows it—the piano silent, the score unplayed, the wallpaper's roses arrested mid-bloom. Everything waits. What looks like a quiet domestic interior is really a meditation on inheritance: a generation rendered as outline, taking its place among the developed.
The restraint is the argument. Idun-Tawiah, whose staged scenes of Ghanaian family life have moved quickly into serious collections, works here at the edge of legibility, trusting a single cast shadow to carry the series' theme of fathers and sons, heroes and friends—roles handed down the way a photograph hands down a face. "9th March," from Hero, Father, Friend, is among his most reticent images and, for that reason, his most exacting.