A warm cone of lamplight gathers father and child into a small, private universe, sealing them off from the sleeping house and the restless city beyond. The room is modest, almost ordinary, yet every detail seems to lean toward them: the floral wallpaper, the soft slouch of the teddy bear, the stack of books waiting their turn. On the wall, children’s drawings hover like a chorus of remembered afternoons, sketching a world the boy is only beginning to name.

The father bends over the open book, tie loosened, shirt creased, the weight of the day still resting on his shoulders. His fatigue is visible, but it is gentled by the brightness of his son’s posture, by the insistence of this nightly ritual. Reading becomes a quiet ceremony of transmission: of language, imagination, and a model of manhood that makes room for tenderness. In this soft exchange, the father becomes the griot, his voice shaping a story that will travel far beyond the bedroom’s four walls.

Carlos Idun-Tawiah bathes the scene in a deliberately nostalgic palette, as if the moment had slipped out of an old family album and into motion. The honeyed light seems to slow time, allowing past and future to mingle in the boy’s illuminated face and the father’s careful attention. What may once have been absent from the artist’s own archive is here reimagined and given back: an image of Black fatherhood articulated through presence, gentleness and care.

Father and Griot, Accra, Ghana, 2024, unfolds as both homage and proposition. It honours the fathers who read late into the night, turning exhaustion into one more page, one more shared breath. At the same time, it quietly insists that such scenes must be seen and preserved, so that this constellation of light, love and listening can endure as a tangible inheritance.