by Jasmina Trifoni
This is not a photograph that punches you in the face by confronting you with the tragedy of a war or a catastrophe—one among the many that, year after year, sweep up prizes at World Press Photo. No: in 9TH MARCH, by 28-year-old Ghanaian photographer Carlos Idun-Tawiah, nothing happens. It could be described, faithfully and correctly, as a large-format black-and-white print (127 x 127 cm) of an ordinary dark room, with ordinary wallpaper and ordinary frames on the walls. In the darkness, you can make out the presence of an upright piano, while a faint beam of light draws the shadow of a child on the wall.
And yet this image has the power to move you. Believe us (it happened to us at the last Paris Photo): it is impossible to escape its mirror effect. We recognize ourselves in that child, remembering the moment—at whatever age in our lives—when we found ourselves facing a pain or a trial we believed was too great to overcome. The scene is still, but it tells, in an extraordinarily dynamic and powerful way, a private instant that was crucial for us and yet irrelevant to the rest of the (our) world.
The date that gives the photograph its title is the date of the death, in 2015, of Carlos Idun-Tawiah’s father. Carlos was eighteen at the time. He recalls that moment like this: “I woke up from an afternoon nap. I got up, left my room and, walking down the long corridor of our house, I went into the kitchen. There I saw my mother in tears, surrounded by all our relatives. And that’s when I learned that my father—my beloved hero—was gone.” This is the photograph he chose to open HERO, FATHER, FRIEND, the series—on view until the end of January at the Triennale di Milano—that earned him the Deloitte Photo Prize 2025, the most prestigious Italian award dedicated to photography.
Working in both black and white and color (“depending on which one feels right for what I want to express,” he explains), this intense body of work was born from his realization that, in the family album, he did not have the photographs of himself with his father that he wished he had—and from the consequent need to fix in memory “what was and what could have been,” to use his own words.
At first glance, they look almost like stolen shots. And yet Carlos Idun-Tawiah, a self-taught photographer (his father had given him his first Polaroid and then his first digital SLR, unsurprisingly), brought to his images—shaped by his engineering studies—an almost obsessive attention to detail in both staging and set design. Each photograph in the series required many days of work and a large number of actors, chosen among friends and neighbors as well as professionals.
Every image is exceptional, as are the wonderfully poetic titles that accompany them—from BROKEN BREAD, in which father and son have breakfast before going to Mass, to IRON FIRST, portraying a boxing lesson as a kind of playful initiation, to THE GRASS IS GREENER WHERE MY FATHER IS, the memory of a Saturday at the golf course, to name just a few. They inhabit an in-between space, suspended between reality and fiction. And they explore, in depth, the concepts of identity, memory, family, and community.
HERO, FATHER, FRIEND is the work that has established Idun-Tawiah as an absolute and mature talent. With him, it becomes clear that African photography has made a leap forward and is now able to speak in a universal language. This is true of this series as well as of his earlier work—from SUNDAY SPECIAL, which stages Sundays in his devoutly Catholic family, to BOYS WILL ALWAYS BE BOYS, an autobiographical look at childhood and its rituals. They are set against the backdrop of an upper-middle-class suburb of Accra, yet they touch everyone’s emotional chords. At every latitude.
And they help us understand the wisdom—free of geographical borders—of an ancient African proverb: “It takes a whole village to raise a boy.”
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