Samuel Fosso

photographer

Samuel Fosso’s photographs have often been exhibited alongside those of his West African compatriots Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita, but Fosso’s work is unique in Africa. Although Fosso worked as a commercial studio photographer like Sidibé and Keita, it is not his portraits of locals but his fascinating self-portraits that have attracted great interest in Africa, Europe and the United States.
His self-portraits have often been compared to the American photographer Cindy Sherman in their presentation of different identities through clothing and props that remain ambiguous in their intention. While this comparison may be superficially apt, it should be noted that Fosso created his portraits in relative isolation in the 1970s, inspired by highlife music and the American singer James Brown, and without knowing that his portraits would eventually be exhibited. Fosso’s self-portraits must also be contextualised within the history and politics of the Central African Republic (CAR). The ambiguous roles that Fosso’s identities play against the backdrop of political turmoil in the CAR make a socio-political critique of the constraints of conventional society, while subtly alluding to the grotesque self-reinventions of the CAR’s dictator, ”Emperor” Jean-Bedel Bokassa.
Born in Cameroon to a Nigerian mother and a Cameroonian father, Samuel Fosso belongs to the Ibo tribe. According to his own story, he was paralysed until the age of three, but was cured when a healer rolled him off the roof of a house. Fosso’s grandfather, who was also a healer and village chief, had arranged for his grandson to be cured.
Fosso’s colour photographic series Le rêve de mon grand-père (2003) refers to this event, showing Fosso painted as a healer and dressed as a chief. According to Fosso, ”It’s a staging of the way of life I experienced as a child, a way of life that has often haunted my dreams […] I did it to pay homage to my grandfather and to honour him”.
Fosso’s mother died when he was five, just as the Biafran civil war broke out in Nigeria, endangering the lives of many Ibos. Fosso’s village fled into the forest to escape the fighting and survived there for several years. At the age of ten, Fosso went to live with his uncle in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.
Two commercial photographers were working in Bangui when Fosso arrived, one from Cameroon and one from Nigeria. Disliking the long, hard hours in his uncle’s shoe factory, Fosso asked his uncle if he could apprentice to the Nigerian photographer, and at the age of 13 opened his own studio, which went through a series of name changes: Studio Photo Gentil, Studio Hoberau, Studio Convenance and Studio Photo Nationale.
Fosso’s black and white studio practice followed the conventions of many West African commercial photographers. He was in the business of making people look their best and ideal selves; in effect, making people look as beautiful as possible. The slogan in his shop read: ”With Studio Photo Nationale you will be beautiful, chic, elegant and easy to recognise’’.
Fosso began taking self-portraits after hours, originally to send to his grandmother in Nigeria to show he was doing well in his new life, but the impulse to take his own picture became a pleasure in itself. Fosso says: ”It was fun […] it was beautiful. I was liberated from the past, from suffering’’.
As a teenager impressed by 1970s youth culture imported from the West, Fosso had a local tailor sew fashionable bell-bottoms and tight shirts from pictures on record covers, such as those of African rock star Prince Nico Mbarga. As Manthia Diawara has noted, such clothing was a sign of youthful rebellion against traditional society, a way of both dissolving ethnic tensions and avoiding the strictures of elders.
Fosso’s black and white self-portraits are an androgynous celebration of the young man’s handsome and sexy persona, imitating rock stars and 1970s dandies.
He kept these photographs to himself; the public distribution of some of them bordered on the erotic, with Fosso posing gracefully in white underwear or wearing nothing but a tight, striped swimsuit and rubber kitchen gloves could have got him into trouble.
Formally, many of Fosso’s early black and white self-portraits feature a chequered or diamond patterned floor, a low patterned stage running the length of the studio horizon, and a backdrop, sometimes with patterned fabric curtains.
Often the backs of studio lights can be seen at the sides of the photograph, glamorously framing the subject. Some photographs show Fosso with a friend dressed in the same clothes. In an appropriation of the aesthetics of advertising or record covers, Fosso also added text to some of his photographs in the form of sticky letters, using proverbs he copied from books such as ”Life is liberty”.
Fosso began to gain international recognition after his self-portraits were exhibited at the first Bamako photography biennial, Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine, in 1994. Two years later, his works were included in the landmark exhibition of African photography, In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. After entering the international art world, Fosso’s style changed.
Fosso was commissioned to shoot a series for the Paris department store Magasins Tati, which was associated with Africa because it had traditionally served the Algerian immigrant community. For this work, Fosso had access to various props and costumes and worked with the help of assistants. The colour photographs in this series continue Fosso’s exploration of different identities, including a lifeguard, an African chief, a ‘liberated American woman’ and a golf player. The roles Fosso plays are more clearly defined than in his earlier self-portraits, although the ambiguity remains in the strangeness of the identities Fosso has chosen. On a more serious note, the black and white series Mémoire d’un ami (2000) refers to the murder of a good friend by the police just outside Fosso’s studio. Metaphorical memorials, these self-portraits reveal discomfort, fear and vulnerability.