Series: Sunday Special.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
71.1 x 50.8 cm / 28 x 20 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 whitewashed colonnade in Accra, three pillars carrying a long band of shade, and beyond them a doorway opening onto a patterned dark. The light here is not dramatic; it is the ordinary afternoon light of a place where people live, settling on cracked concrete and a bare bulb that no one has bothered to switch on. Into this veranda, as if it had always been his, a man in a pale suit has set his chair at the lip of the shade and sat astride it, ankles crossed over polished oxfords, looking back at us with a calm that is almost a question. He is at home, and the photograph knows it.
What moves me is who else is here, and how unbothered they are by being looked at. To the left, half-given to the shadow, a man bends over an ironing board, pressing cloth with the quiet seriousness of work that will never be famous. To the right, a younger man in a flat cap leans into a pillar, one foot kicked against the wall, his head lowered to something cupped in his hands, lost in it. Between the one who labors and the one who waits, the seated man simply presides. No one performs. The door behind opens onto its patterned dark.
Idun-Tawiah works in a silvery grey that remembers the great West African studio portraitists, but the room is Ghanaian and now: the cracked concrete underfoot, the lived light. To photograph Black men this tenderly, at ease and in their own rooms, is a quiet argument about who gets to be seen at rest. In an edition of three, this is one of the early prints from a young Accra eye already being collected abroad — a picture of home made by someone still learning, with us, what home is allowed to look like.