Samuel Fosso, Emperor of Africa, Autoportrait, co-published with The Walther Collection and SteidlAll images © Samuel Fosso — Samuel Fosso, *Emperor of Africa*, Autoportrait, co-published with The Walther Collection and Steidl
All images © Samuel Fosso

Fashion photography has long been used to make a statement, to critique society, to explain a struggle, to engage a viewer. A bare chest or the curve of a spine evokes sexuality. A series of portraits creates a storyline, echoing a narrative and creating emotional resonance. Samuel Fosso engages this photographical tradition from a unique perspective. In Autoportrait, Fosso draws on his personal relationship with the medium of photography and his own cultural history to create a varied, multilayered, often political collection of self-portraits.

Simultaneously playful and contemplative, Fosso’s work confronts the viewer with manifold approaches to discussing and defining masculinity. Each of the images confronts the viewer with a gendered or transgendered self. Fosso’s relationship with photography is deeply informed by a personal motivation to create a liberated liminal space along spectrums of gender, sexuality, and of course, fashion. Though Fosso is known for self-portraiture, the versions of himself that he presents are perhaps better described as self-referential avatars, invented characters whose life stories intersect, but never fully merge with, his own.

Samuel Fosso, Black Pope, Autoportrait, co-published with The Walther Collection and SteidlAll images © Samuel Fosso — Samuel Fosso, *Black Pope,* Autoportrait, co-published with The Walther Collection and Steidl
All images © Samuel Fosso

Fosso’s work is explicitly personal and political. In one piece, he portrays the murder of a friend and neighbor who was killed while Fosso hid from danger in his home. These portraits display a nude Fosso on a bare mattress in a sparse bedroom, pressed against a door, crouched in a box, unmistakably alone. These photos, as much a personal account as an acutely political statement, create a deliberate theatricalization of perceived reality. It is Fosso’s ability to blend romance, rage, and vulnerability that makes Autoportrait so arresting.

Fosso makes a point of addressing his own complicated relationship with concepts of home and exile—in one series, he dresses himself in the full ceremonial costume of a titled Igbo man, and then as a participant in funerary and title-taking ceremonies—ceremonies in which Fosso himself never partook, having grown up outside of Nigeria, isolated from his Igbo heritage. In many ways, the camera is his witness to these symbolic actions—reincorporating the life of his homeland into the life he actually leads. He expands his perspective to explore the idea of real people as characters in this dialogue of diaspora. He frames himself in iconic poses that are instantly recognizable—his choices of self and subject include but are not limited to Patrice Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr, and Aimé Césaire. Fosso explains this collection as an answer to his need to “pay tribute to those that set [him] free.” Later, in references to colonial iconography—the history of French imperialism in particular— Fosso presents highly staged photos, shot against painted backdrops, to continue challenging his viewers. He blends intimacy with spectacle, tying patriotism and propaganda in with ideals of valor and honor.

Samuel Fosso, Tati, Autoportrait, co-published with The Walther Collection and SteidlAll images © Samuel Fosso — Samuel Fosso, *Tati,* Autoportrait, co-published with The Walther Collection and Steidl
All images © Samuel Fosso

Fosso’s work is a series of cumulative self-confrontation and subjectivity—he immerses himself in a dialogue with the camera as well as with various social constructs of race and gender. He engages the sociopolitical complexities of African and African diaspora history, never shying away from difficult subjects. His ability to blend the personal with the political and to infuse his portraits with layers upon layers of meaning lends itself to an incredible degree of flexibility and complexity. With Autoportrait, Fosso takes iconic and painful imagery alike and shapes them into something truly extraordinary.

Autoportrait by Samuel Fosso, co-published with The Walther Collection and Steidl.