Autoportraits des années 70 (Self-Portraits from the 70s), photographs, 1970s
Samuel Fosso, African Spirits, photographs, 2008

Samuel Fosso grew up in Nigeria, but was forced to leave at the end of the Biafran war in 1972. He moved to Bangui, in the Central African Republic, where he found work as an assistant photographer. Six months later, aged 13, he opened his own photographic portrait studio. At night, after he had already worked all day photographing clients, Fosso started taking self-portraits using up exposures left on his rolls of film in order to send to his grandmother in Nigeria. His initial aim was to show that he was alive but his interest in exploring the genre grew steadily, and he started experimenting with new techniques and poses. In one series, Fosso poses in front of a backdrop of Bucharest, which was a model for the socialist Central African Republic; in another he poses in a t-shirt featuring presidents of the Central African Republic. As the years went by, the clothes became more outlandish and the poses more experimental. Fosso carried on like this for 20 years, neatly filing away the negatives, printing some, but keeping them to himself. In 1994, he was approached by Bernard Descamps, a French photographer who was organizing an exhibition of African photography in Mali. He dusted off what had become a substantial body of work, which formed a part of exhibitions that traveled from Mali to Paris and all over the world, leading to fame in the contemporary art field. Yet, he keeps taking photographs of his clients. In each of his personal photographs Fosso is a subject, an object and a creator. Fosso’s playful fragmentation of the self-portrait creates a clever counterpoint to Africa’s history of photographic colonialism, a form of aesthetic Euro-centrism, which reduced indigenous cultural and social complexities to convenient one-liners.