Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.
Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.
At the tender age of 13, Samuel Fosso set up Studio Photo Nationale, and began his career as a photographer. The year was 1975, and Fosso was working in the city of Bangui, located just inside the border of Central African Republic.
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“With Studio National, you will be beautiful, stylish, dainty and easy to recognize,” Fosso promised. Here he works taking passport, portrait, and wedding photographs for the community—but it was his self-portraits that brought the artist global acclaim.
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“I started taking self-portraits simply to use up spare film; people wanted their photographs the next day, even if the roll wasn’t finished, and I didn’t like waste. The idea was to send some pictures to my mother in Nigeria, to show her I was all right.,” Fosso told The Guardian in 2011. “Then I saw the possibilities. I started trying different costumes, poses, backdrops. It began as a way of seeing myself grow up, and slowly it became a personal history – as well as art, I suppose.”
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And from this seed of genius, a life’s work arose, one that is rooted in the complexity of layering, meaning, and identity inherent to the self, and just how plastic these things are when we skate along the surface of life, mistaking appearances for the thing they claim to represent.
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Like a great actor, Fosso delves deep within himself and returns with an understanding of human nature and the way it manifests in the body, and on the face, through costume, gesture, and expression. For the past forty years, Fosso has honed his craft, creating a body of work that examines the experience of life as a West African man.
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Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.
Photo: Samuel Fosso 70s series, by Samuel Fosso, c. 1976/1977. © Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/ Paris.