Series: Sunday Special.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
50.8 x 40.6 cm / 20 x 16 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
There is a particular tenderness to be found in the way the older twin’s hand comes to rest on his brother’s shoulder, fingers loose, the wrist turned so the forearm lies flat and unforced. It is the gesture of someone who has done this before, who owns the small authority of being first-born by minutes, and Idun-Tawiah lets it carry the portrait. The seated younger brother, book on his knee, leans into that hand without quite acknowledging it. Anyone who has a sibling will recognise the arrangement instantly, and it is the sort of intimate, unguarded detail that a good portrait lives or dies by.
The dressing rewards a slow, collector’s eye. Both wear the sleeveless knit-over-shirt of Accra Sunday best, but the pleasures are in the mismatches: one tie striped and pointed, the other a small monochrome check; one vest coarse and bold, the other close and grey. Skin and starched white cotton are the brightest things in the frame, lifted out of a velvet dark that Idun-Tawiah keeps luxuriously deep. He is clearly a photographer who loves fabric and grooming, the sculpted hair, the pressed collar, and he photographs them the way a fashion portraitist does, as evidence of care and self-possession rather than mere costume.
For all the studio poise, the picture stays warm. The younger brother’s gaze is the steadier of the two, faintly amused, while the elder’s is more searching, as if the responsibility on his face were real. That asymmetry of temperament, held inside a nearly symmetrical pose, is what keeps the image from being a mere exercise in style. It is finally a portrait of belonging to another person, of the ease and the weight of it both, and one leaves it feeling one has been let a little way into a household.