Carlos Idun-Tawiah

Carlos Idun-Tawiah (born May 18, 1997, in Takoradi, Ghana) is a Ghanaian photographer and filmmaker based in Accra whose practice transforms personal and collective memory into cinematic visual narratives about contemporary African life. Drawing extensively from family albums, vernacular photography, African photographic archives, fashion imagery, and lived experience, Idun-Tawiah moves between documentary and fiction, reconstructing scenes that feel simultaneously remembered and imagined. His photographs center the intimate rhythms of Black life—family, friendship, faith, childhood, youth, community, love, and everyday ritual—while approaching joy and hope as forms of cultural preservation and resistance.  Questions of family, grief, masculinity, and inherited memory became particularly prominent in Hero, Father, Friend. Prompted by the death of his father and the realization that very few photographs existed of them together, Idun-Tawiah constructs an imagined photographic biography of the relationship he remembers—and the experiences he wishes had been preserved. Through staged scenes of fathers and sons eating, traveling, playing, praying, grooming, embracing, and simply spending time together, the series considers Black fatherhood through tenderness, vulnerability, care, and ordinary intimacy rather than stereotype. Memories Between Earth and Sky, developed collaboratively with his mother, extends this approach by imaginatively reconstructing the largely unphotographed love story between his parents.  Idun-Tawiah’s work has been presented internationally through Les Rencontres d’Arles, Triennale Milano, Paris Photo, AIPAD—The Photography Show, Getxophoto, Fotofestiwal Łódź, LagosPhoto, Belfast Photo Festival, CONTACT Photography Festival, The Armory Show, and Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2025, he won the Deloitte Photo Grant’s Segnalazioni/Nomination section for Hero, Father, Friend, leading to a museum presentation at Triennale Milano. In 2026, his work entered the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and he began a three-month residency at Studio Voltaire in London focused on expanding photography into sculptural objects, installations, and historical photographic processes.