Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 1997

Idun-Tawiah photographs three people from behind, walking away down an institutional corridor toward a lit doorway and a hanging sign that reads RECEPTION, its yellow letters and red arrow the sharpest graphic note in an otherwise muted green-and-cream interior. At the centre a man in a striped shirt and white trousers carries a sleeping child, whose head lolls back over his forearm and whose legs dangle at his side; to his right a woman in a pale floral gown walks with both hands raised to the back of her head. The picture is all recession, a one-point perspective pulling the eye toward the exit.

What interests here is the temporality the image builds. By turning the figures away and pointing them at a doorway, Idun-Tawiah makes the photograph about leaving rather than arriving, about a moment already dissolving into the next. The sleeping child is the still point in a scene defined by transit, a small body that has surrendered its own sense of time to the adults conveying it. The corridor’s fluorescent institutional light, the RECEPTION sign, the distant EXIT, all locate this tenderness inside a bureaucratic architecture, and that friction between the public setting and the private cargo is the picture’s cool intelligence.

The title reframes the whole. In the hand of the father: the phrase makes the carried, dreaming child the literal object of the words, and turns an anonymous back view into a statement about custody and care. Within an elegiac series, the image works less as a portrait than as a proposition about protection as something enacted, in motion, on the way out of somewhere. Idun-Tawiah withholds the faces so that the gesture can stand for more than these particular people, so that fatherhood registers not as expression but as posture, as the plain fact of holding on while walking toward the light.