David Awunyoh

The Kente cloth which I am wearing belongs to my parents. This cloth has a deep historical association with wealth, high social status and cultural sophistication and was originally worn by Ghanaian kings. On one level my work seeks to pay homage to my cultural lineage and functions as an intergenerational conversation between my parents and I. Additionally, I look to explore how my father’s traditional shirt and my mother’s traditional cloth metaphorically become a part of my identity and how they begin to mould me in our family’s tradition and culture. In these photographic portraits I embody a West African tradition of photography and staging, formally in my compositions I am also interested in rejecting, replicating and extending these
conventions and traditions of portraiture particularly in the African continent. Simultaneously, I draw my inspiration from the language of film and photography.

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