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 PHOTOGRAPHY & PRINT THE FAIR

Coming at a time of mass healing and resuscitation of social freedoms, Autoportrait is the first comprehensive survey of photographer, Samuel Fosso’s multifaceted oeuvre — ringing particularly significant during the Black Lives Matter movement. Spanning four decades of production, the book charts his conceptual practice of self-portraiture; and the artist’s zeal for sexuality, gender, and self-representation. The monographic book was published by Steidl in July, 2019.

His early portraits in black-and-white from the 1970s are featured, along with his playful, serenely creative, and resplendent self-directed exercises in portraiture — including the vibrancy of his series “Tati” (1997), where the artists playfully inhabits African and African American characters and archetypes. Then come the majestic, even lofty portraits of “African Spirits” (2008), which depict him posing as icons of the pan-African liberation and Civil Rights movements: most notably portraying Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, and Patrice Lumumba. What’s especially impressive is the artist’s ability to render the fleeting moment through these icons — a rendition of lived experience, in painstaking fervour.

Autoportrait in all its artistic prowess also serves as a debunking of bogus myths appropriated by art critics and pundits in Western culture. The assumption presides on African culture mimicking Western art after the new arrival of photographic technology in the continent. When in fact Western artistic codes were flipped and local photographers and sitters accommodated new trends rooted in the aesthetics of community, social and artistic codes, prestige, and beauty that would have been relevant within the sitters’ circle.

Samuel Fosso’s work enriches the history of West African portrait photography, prompting a comprehensive viewing experience of photography’s social and artistic use.

Historically, during the peak of colonialism, many European photographers were taking dehumanising photographs, while Africans were commissioning and consuming photography — marking their own stamp on, and developing a genre. And indeed, in retrospect there are clear distinctions between the creative pursuance of West African photography and the devotees of photography manipulation in the early 20th century — particularly rife in Europe and the Soviet Union. The rigmarole of manipulating reality was sidestepped by a culture ripening their own style of photography.

The unique aesthetic of Samuel Fosso’s work will satiate artistic impulses far and wide; viewing the work offers the chance to unbend a little and enjoy the resplendent composition and colour; whilst offering an edifying lecture on a complex and varied history.

Samuel Fosso allows viewers to glance across a kernel of history — a dazzlingly elegant display of a genre shining through colonialism. A new trend and depiction of independence; a way capturing a culture’s truths and reinforcing its own take on history. In essence, a new meaning to self- representation.