Better Left Unsaid: Intimate Connection in Urban Ghana

There is something almost too tender about this photograph. Carlos Idun-Tawiah's "Better Left Unsaid" (2024) catches us looking at what we rarely get to see—a father and son embracing in the cramped quarters of an Accra trotro, those utilitarian minibuses that ferry Ghana's urban multitudes.

The image arrives from "Hero, Father, Friend," itself a kind of photographic séance with absence. Born from the photographer's own childhood loss—his father died when Idun-Tawiah was eighteen, leaving behind a conspicuous absence of photographs together—the series operates between memory and invention, between what was and what might have been.

What strikes us first is the photograph's refusal to behave as documentation should. The golden light feels too perfect for public transport. This is Idun-Tawiah working in that productive ambiguity between fiction and non-fiction that runs through contemporary African photography.

The metal railings and worn upholstery frame rather than intrude, becoming peripheral to what matters: the weight of one body against another, the unconscious geometry of care. In Ghanaian society, where public displays of affection between men operate within cultural constraints, this image does something quietly radical. The trotro becomes less transport than moving chapel of human connection.

The title operates on multiple registers, acknowledging cultural reticence around masculine emotional expression while giving that reticence form. The photograph becomes visual translation of the unspoken—communications that pass between bodies without words.

This is photography as resurrection, creating "an archive of love, joy, community and hope." It refuses familiar narratives of urban African struggle in favor of something more elusive: persistent human capacity for connection amid daily survival's machinery.

Idun-Tawiah represents a generation for whom the archive is both inheritance and invention, demonstrating photography's capacity to materialize what memory cannot hold—giving form to gaps between experience and recollection.