In the mid-1970s, at the same time Cindy Sherman started making self portraits to explore the construction of white female identity, half way around the globe, Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso opened his own studio at the tender age of 13. Casting himself as the subject of his work, Fosso used photography to stake his claim in the world.
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Born in 1962, Fosso was sick and partly paralyzed as a child. Although Nigerians traditionally commission a portrait of their child at three months, his father saw it as a waste of money. Fosso wasn’t photographed until he was 10 — a void that shaped his vision from the very beginning. Growing up in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, Fosso fled to Bangui, Central African Republic, to live with an uncle after his mother died. He apprenticed at a local photo studio for just five months before opening Studio Photo National in 1975.
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“In Africa we say to become a real photographer you have to take the picture and then make the print yourself; that’s how you establish your professional credentials,” Fosso says in the new book, Autoportrait (The Walther Collection/Steidl), which brings together five decades of Fosso’s self portraiture.
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