Series: Boys Will Always Be Boys.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
83.8 x 127 cm / 33 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
Six schoolboys in white shirts and dark ties cross a sunlit Accra street, and Idun-Tawiah has caught them at the precise instant when the group scatters into six separate sentences. One boy points and laughs; another walks and grins over his shoulder; a third tilts his head back to blow a trumpet skyward; two on the right leap, one with his arm flung up as a soccer ball hangs in the air beside the trumpet’s bell. The frame holds two arcs at once, the ball and the note, neither yet returned to earth.
What the photograph knows, and says plainly, is that a street is a stage only for those young enough to forget they are being watched. The weathered colonial building behind them, its shuttered windows and corrugated roof pressed flat by the high sun, supplies the still backdrop against which the boys’ bodies write their diagonals. Idun-Tawiah works in a silvery monochrome that flattens the heat and lengthens the shadows the boys throw across the tarmac, so that each figure drags a second, darker self behind him.
The picture belongs to the tradition of the descriptive photograph, the kind that trusts the world to arrange itself if the photographer waits long enough at the right corner. Nothing here is posed into meaning, yet everything coheres: the tie loosened, the sock slipped, the shoe mid-kick. Idun-Tawiah lets the uniform, that instrument of sameness, become the very ground on which difference plays. The result is less a record of boys than a small argument about how freely a photograph can hold motion without stilling it into nostalgia.