Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 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
The frame is mostly night. A man and a small boy cross a zebra-striped road from left to right, caught mid-stride, and almost everything else recedes into black. At the right edge a vertical sign reads ACCRA CITY PUB & GRILL, a neon strip glows against a wall, a smaller sign promises 24hr banking, and a No Parking disc hangs pale in the dark. The white bars of the crossing carry what little light there is, and the two walking figures are placed against them so that the pedestrian markings become, in effect, the picture’s only ground.
Everything depends on the moment of the shutter. The man’s trailing foot is still lifted, the boy in his bucket hat lags a half step behind, and the interval between them is exactly the interval a child keeps from an adult he is following and trying to match. Idun-Tawiah has found the instant when two separate walks read as one, when the geometry of the crossing and the geometry of the stride line up. A second earlier or later and the relation collapses; here it holds.
What the frame excludes does as much work as what it includes. By letting the buildings, the parked shapes, the far streetlights drop into near-total shadow, the photographer strips the street to its essentials: a diagonal, two silhouettes, a scatter of signage naming the place. The edge on the right, where the lit signs cluster, pulls against the dark expanse on the left, and the crossing runs between them like a caption written in paint. It is a night picture that trusts the medium’s oldest instrument, the frame, to make an ordinary errand legible as form.