AFRICA SEEN AND UNDERSTOOD THROUGH NEW EYES
Milan. At the Triennale, the works of Carlos Dun‑Tawiah, a young talent in African photography and winner of the Deloitte Photo Grant, portray the special bond that links children to their fathers across a free and independent continent.
He woke in the silence of a spring night, not with a jolt, but letting an unfamiliar sound slip softly through the folds of his sleep, like a stranger, a ghost, a mysterious enemy. In the next room his mother was crying. One look was enough—the disorientation in her eyes, begging for mercy and demanding courage—to understand everything: his father was dead.
That day in March 2015 Carlos Idun‑Tawiah was eighteen, and his father—though the son did not yet know it—had left him the most precious tool for remembering him, for holding tight to the moments they had shared, and one day for imagining and constructing, with the precision of a love‑induced hallucination, those hugs, those breakfasts, those football matches, those clumsy first attempts on the trumpet, those journeys following a distant cargo ship, which had never really existed and which only photography can make falsely real. In the suitcase that was meant to accompany his father’s return from London, where he worked in a bank, back home to Accra in Ghana, Carlos found a camera, a gift his father had finally granted him after many requests.
Today Carlos Idun‑Tawiah is one of the emerging talents of African photography, and his work—put forward to the jury by Francesca Malgara, director of the Mia Photo Fair BnP Paribas—has won the Deloitte Photo Grant, curated by Denis Curti, and is currently on display under the title “Hero, Father, Friend” at the Triennale in Milan.
The theme of the third edition of the award is contrast, and perhaps the strongest contrast—beyond the one between truth and fiction that drives Carlos’s work—is the gap between the image of Africa that we tell only through its tragedies, real certainly, and another Africa that tells its own story instead: proudly, fully, and wrapped in the comfort of a peaceful life—which also exists. This Africa reflects on itself, its history, the family institution at the foundation of everything, therefore on the relationship between fathers and sons, and on that unique bond that connects all the children to the fathers of a free, independent Africa. Colonialism is over.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah’s starting point is six albums preserving family memories: official portraits made in the studio that continue the glorious tradition of Seydou Keita, Malick Sibidé, and later Samuel Fosso and Carrie Mae Weems, alongside more private shots—casual, joyful, simple snapshots. Yet, there are too few of each for a 28-year-old man to process his grief, which is not only the death of his father but the death of their shared future.
In the face of this inconsolable absence, Carlos decided to expand the past and imagine, through a screenplay, set design, and film casting—he is also a filmmaker—the everyday moments that photography usually discards as too banal but that wounded memory desperately seeks.
There is no dining room bathed in soft light that gently touches everything, where Carlos’s child alter ego breakfasts with his smiling father, the festive day stretching before them. But there is, yes, a desire to hold on to that moment of happiness—indeed, to create "the opportunity to photograph memories already lost," as Pancho Saula, founder of Galeria Alta, suggests. Galeria Alta supports the artist and presented him at the most admired stand at the last Paris Photo.
There is also no bus station where the father holds his son in his arms, perhaps to comfort him before yet another departure. Nor does that morning exist when the father helped his son put on new, elegant adult shoes; nearby lie the little soccer cleats and a ball because the father is also a coach, guide, hero, and friend on the soccer field.
Carlos Idun-Tawiah cleverly exploits the historical ambiguity of photography by including props that are happily absurd—like a bouquet of fake flowers in a vase of water—alongside items that truly belonged to his loved ones. Among the things that survived the storm of time in the catalog are his grandmother’s dress and necklace, worn by a young actress; a piano where his grandfather sits while Carlos’s little sister dances nearby; the sheet music of his father’s favorite Methodist hymn, Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun; and a pair of boxing gloves. Many striking photographs in the “Be a Man” series are set in the boxing ring—a place of training in combat and resilience. On the gym walls, images of Muhammad Ali appear, as if Carlos’s father entrusted him with his most formative and hopeful message: “Whether inside or outside the ring, there’s nothing wrong with falling. It’s wrong to stay down,” Cassius Clay used to say.
Politics seems distant from the horizon of this small, warm, sunny, and always smiling world, where tenderness, faith, and protective male figures—the grandfather, the barber uncle, friends—guide the boy Carlos once was. Yet subtle signs of rebellion surface here and there, like little stones in fairy tales that guide the way under the moonlight.
One strange alphabet book, for example, the one Carlos’s father-double holds while the son points his finger at it, stands out because its cover features Francisco Goya’s famous painting, The Third of May 1808, commemorating the Madrid uprising against Napoleon’s invading army. The French reprisal was swift and brutal, with hundreds of Spaniards executed.
The leaders who freed Africa from colonial powers no longer raise their arms before a firing squad, but they do pose with dignity in official portraits Carlos included in one of his most powerful images titled The Only Ticket to Return Home. Behind the father and son dressed as pilots stand Kwame Nkrumah, in traditional attire, the first president of independent Ghana in 1957, and Thomas Sankara wearing a red beret, president of Burkina Faso. In this frame of family cinema, like an old Super 8 memory, the father teaches his son to tie his tie. Perhaps he called him by his nickname, Paakwesi, meaning “born on Sunday” in the Akan language. And today, my son, it is Sunday—your day—and life truly belongs to you.
