Series: Sunday Special.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
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
A group portrait usually asks for the smile, that small contraction held just long enough for the shutter. Here the instruction is the opposite, printed in the title and obeyed by every face: don't. Some two dozen people array themselves against the honeyed sandstone and pointed arches of an Accra church, and not one of them performs pleasure. They hold instead a level, unhurried attention, as if the camera were not catching them but waiting with them.
What the picture is doing becomes clear once you accept its refusal. Without the smile, the eye stops reading expression and starts reading arrangement — the seated quartet at the centre, the man in clerical black flanked by a woman in a feathered hat, an elder in kente whose cloth is the only loud thing in the frame. Around them the others rise in a careful frieze: pinstripe and waistcoat, white ankle socks, a single red tie answering the single red cap. Tailoring and tradition are not in conflict so much as held in the same long exposure of a Sunday.
Idun-Tawiah builds the Sunday Special series from exactly this material — the family album as a place where a community decides how it wishes to be remembered, and restages that decision with a director's patience. The stillness is the subject. By withholding the cheerful reflex that snapshots demand, the photograph keeps its people from being consumed at a glance and returns them, slowly, to the dignity of simply being looked at. One of the defining young Ghanaian photographers working now, he turns the most conventional of formats into a quiet argument about who gets to sit for the picture, and how.