Samuel Fosso

Samuel Fosso (born 1962, Kumba, Cameroon) is a Cameroonian photographer who was best known for his “autoportraits,” in which he transformed himself into other people and characters drawn from popular culture and politics.

Fosso lived in Nigeria as a child, but the conflict caused by the secession of Biafra in the late 1960s forced his family to flee to Bangui, Central African Republic, where he ultimately settled. He discovered photography in his early teens while working as a shoemaker, and by 1975, after a brief apprenticeship with a local photographer, he had opened his own studio. He lived and worked at the studio, creating portraits of the local residents by using studio lights fashioned from pots and backgrounds made from traditional African fabrics or hand-painted by friends. At day’s end he would often step in front of the camera to finish a roll of film. While Fosso used these images to communicate his well-being to his grandmother in Nigeria, the staged self-portraits also became agents of transformation and expression for the young artist, who was acutely aware of shifting cultural and political climates. In many of his early images, Fosso borrowed elements from popular culture that he admired, even having local tailors replicate outfits worn by celebrities.

In 1993 Fosso’s images were discovered by French photographer Bernard Deschamps, who was looking for photographers to be included in the first edition of “Rencontres de la photographie africaine” in Bamako, Mali. That 1994 exhibition launched Fosso’s career as an artist, and he later went on to win the Afrique en Création award in 1995 and the prestigious Prince Claus Award in 2001. Although his work drew comparisons to traditional African studio photographers (such as Seydou Keïta of Mali) and Western photographers who utilized self-portraiture (such as American Cindy Sherman), Fosso operated in relative isolation.

Fosso continued to evolve and expand the scope of his autoportraits, using the constructed images to critically narrate and reference cultural and political events. In the Tati series, commissioned by the Parisian department store Tati in 1997, Fosso depicted himself as characters ranging from an African chief draped in gold jewelry and leopard skins to a glamorous African American woman. In his photographic series African Spirits, Fosso transformed himself into various Black leaders, politicians, and cultural icons, including former South African president Nelson Mandela, American boxer Muhammad Ali, and American activist and academic Angela Davis.

In 2014 his studio in Bangui was looted amid political unrest. Rosso was living in Paris at the time, but much of his archive was destroyed. However, the Walther Collection in New York City managed to mount a solo exhibition of his work later that year.