In “Own this Second Forever, Accra, 2024”, Carlos Idun-Tawiah captures a moment that feels at once fleeting and eternal.

The photograph glows with the warmth of afternoon light, resting softly on the skin of its subjects as if time itself pauses to breathe. Within this suspended instant, life hums quietly—a heartbeat caught between laughter and reflection. The image distills the beauty of existing completely in the present, of belonging wholly to a single second.

Idun-Tawiah’s composition is both tender and deliberate. His subjects occupy the frame with an unstudied grace, conscious of being seen yet utterly natural within that gaze.

Each detail—the texture of cloth, the dust hanging in sunlight, the faint curve of a smile—suggests presence without performance. The viewer senses truth unfolding gently before the lens, as if witnessing a conversation between stillness and motion.

Though Accra remains unseen, its spirit fills the photograph: the scent of red earth after rain, children’s voices echoing in distant streets, the rhythm of a city alive beneath quiet surfaces. This is not an image of spectacle, but of belonging—a portrait of place as memory and of time as feeling. The background hums like an afterthought of home, grounding the universal in the deeply personal.

The title transforms the image into a meditation on impermanence. It speaks to the yearning to hold on to what inevitably passes—touch, light, connection—and to the wisdom of cherishing rather than clinging. Idun-Tawiah immortalizes not the moment itself, but the act of noticing it. The photograph reminds viewers that to truly own a second is simply to be present within it. In that awareness, the transient becomes timeless, and what was once ordinary turns infinite.