Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 1997

Black and white, close in, the two of them shoulder to shoulder and mugging straight at us: a man with a full afro and mustache, grinning wide in a plaid flannel robe, and beside him a boy in white towelling, chin thrown up and eyes shut in mock concentration. Both have lather on their faces, both draw a razor along a cheek, and Idun-Tawiah crops tight enough that the shaving becomes a shared performance rather than a chore. Behind them a tiled wall and a lace-trimmed rack of folded towels place the scene squarely in the bathroom, that small theatre where boys first watch men do the things men do.

The photograph runs on mimicry, and it is funny before it is anything else. The man’s smile is unguarded, teeth and all; the child’s is more studied, the exaggerated pucker of someone imitating an adult’s seriousness and enjoying the imitation too much to hold it. There is nothing on the boy’s face to shave and everyone in the frame knows it, which is the joke and also the tenderness. Idun-Tawiah trusts the gag to carry the weight, letting the razors and the foam stand in for a whole apprenticeship in manhood conducted, as these things are, half in earnest and half in play.

Choosing monochrome pulls the picture toward the family album and the barbershop wall, toward a vernacular of Black masculine grooming that the series treats as inheritance rather than vanity. Inside the elegy for a lost father, the mirror-morning ritual becomes the thing a son keeps: not advice, not a speech, but the muscle memory of a man’s face beside your own, both of you lathered and laughing. The towels are folded, the light is even and kind, the moment is entirely staged and entirely believed. What the photograph preserves is the ease of it, the way tenderness travels fastest disguised as a game.