Carlos Idun-Tawiah Ghanaian, b. 18/5/1997
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40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
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Carlos Idun-Tawiah’s photograph, part of the series Hero, father, son: The Grass is Greener Where my Father is, pulses with generational continuity, tenderness, and legacy under the Ghanaian sun in Accra, 2024.
Idun-Tawiah crafts scenes where time bends and everyday rituals rise to poetic heights. His lens honors the complexity of African life, imbuing familiar moments with gravity, nostalgia, and warmth.
Amid the radiant expanses of the golf course, a father stands, steady in mid-putt, embodying grace and purposeful care. Three boys—presumably his sons—cluster nearby, intent and curious, their golf clubs poised at their sides.
Each gesture and posture is laden with meaning: the transmission of skill, the inheritance of dreams, the silent lessons of patience and discipline. A helper, possibly a caddy, steadies a cart, grounding the scene in lived experience, where mentorship and service blend seamlessly with intimacy. The landscape stretches lush and wide, shimmering with possibility, echoing the hope and quiet ambition Idun-Tawiah celebrates in his body of work.
Golf here becomes more than sport; it’s a metaphor for nurture and aspiration. The green is fertile ground for connection, where fatherhood is enacted not just in instruction but in presence, acknowledgment, and vulnerability.
The children watch, learn, and emulate, their crisp uniforms both recalling tradition and hinting at the palpable newness of their own stories. Idun-Tawiah’s narrative imagery subverts golf’s associations with exclusivity, illustrating instead the gentleness, love, and creative resistance thriving in Black homes and communities.
Rich with memory yet insistently present, the photograph is less an account of leisure than an act of reclamation and possibility. It suggests that greatness is cultivated in the ordinary—a father’s shadow rippling across grass, a child’s careful imitation, the forging of legacy in shared sunlight.
Idun-Tawiah offers viewers not just a depiction of family, but a lived archive where lineage becomes hope, and heritage is lovingly reimagined.