Samuel Fosso on personal trauma, moments of history and self-representation

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Fosso Fashion 2021. Curated by Grace Wales Bonner, 2021 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris

The pioneering contemporary self-portraitist reflects on his life’s work as a major, touring retrospective of his work opens in Huis Marseille this weekend

Samuel Fosso brandishes his physique like a powerful instrument, with which he reckons with diaspora and postcolonial identity. The French-Cameroonian photographer’s eponymous exhibition at Huis Marseille, on show until March 2023, is a continuation of the one that ran from autumn 2021 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. The new iteration retains the retrospective aspect of Fosso’s robust five-decade career, but “bringing the same images to a new place obviously always brings its share of the unknown, with a different alchemy,” Fosso notes. His work will fill the entirety of the Amsterdam museum with primarily large format prints: producing visuals at this scale accentuates the details he carefully envisions. In tandem, on another continent, the Princeton University Art Museum presents Samuel Fosso: Affirmative Acts, the first major US survey, on view in downtown Princeton until January 2023.

The main themes of Fosso’s oeuvre include the psyche of selfhood and the multiplicity contained within each person, using a studio setting to implement stylised forms of representation. To date, some of his images are held within the collections of Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, among others. It is not insignificant that Fosso’s image covers cultural historian Mark Sealy’s book Photography: Race, Rights and Representation (2022), in which Sealy writes: “Our understanding of Africa is implicitly linked to, and cannot be separated from, the way we have been invited to see Africa”, qualifying that this lens has mostly been “a meaningless set of contradictions, stereotypes and polarities”. Fosso is one of the actors whose work has helped shift the marginalised view imposed by the European gaze, shifting outside perceptions from within the territory.

From the series 70's Lifestyle, 1975-1978 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris
From the series 70's Lifestyle, 1975-1978 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris
From the series 70's Lifestyle, 1975-1978 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris
From the series 70's Lifestyle, 1975-1978 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris

Fosso’s work is often equated with that of Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta: all pillars of beautiful studio portraiture from the African continent (in 1997 the three were commissioned by Parisian department store Tati – located in Barbès, a neighbourhood where many African immigrants live – to recreate the African photo studio). But Nigerian curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor situated Fosso’s work as more akin to that of Pierre Molinier, the French self-portraitist who toyed with gender codes, and Yasumasa Morimura, the Japanese performer/photographer who places himself within iconic artworks. In a future-facing timeline, Fosso seems an indelible precedent to Omar Victor Diop and the idea of channelling the self to vehicle the past in a way that powerfully deconstructs stereotypes about African identities.

The selection of over 200 photos at Huis Marseille, spanning from the 1970s to today, was, “as exhaustive as possible by selecting what best embodied each period of my work,” Fosso states. “It was important to cover the different aspects of my journey: each series of self-portraits is represented, and there is also a good overview of my work as a studio portraitist.” He notes that the period from the 70s was the hardest to extract a selection from: “At that time, I didn’t yet consider myself an artist; retaining, a posteriori, the best of this continuous flow was a very interesting challenge.” 

Although often a wholly independent actor, Fosso has also dabbled in collaborative endeavours. In 1999, he shot a 10-image autumn/winter editorial for Vogue Hommes International in his Bangui studio, and in 2021, he featured in an issue of A Magazine Curated By helmed by menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner. The motivational thrust for these is underpinned by “un goût profond pour la mode” – “a deep love of fashion” – something that has been true for him ever since adolescence. For his contemporary collaboration with Wales Bonner, who situates her aesthetic as “European heritage with an Afro Atlantic spirit”, Fosso fondly praised the dapper styling: “I wore the outfits proposed as naturally as I would have in any series.”

From series Mémoire d'un ami, 2000 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris
From series Mémoire d'un ami, 2000 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris

“My creativity has always been intimately linked to what I have experienced”

 

Fosso’s career and visibility grew over decades until he weathered the unthinkable in 2014: the destruction of his house and the looting of his equipment and archives. This “constituted a trauma from which I still have not recovered,” he recalls. “The lost material, the violence of the event and the atrocities of the civil war [Biafran War] plunged me into a deep depression for which I had to be treated and whose consequences I still suffer today.” After this excruciating experience he was forced to reinvent himself, while journalists, photographers and international organisations helped him recover the bulk of his negatives. 

He refused to be defeated by this, however, saying: “My creativity has always been intimately linked to what I have experienced and I would say that the series SIXSIXSIX, which followed the atrocities of 2014, reflects the inspiration that I draw from the worst times of my life.” These many hundreds of self-portrait Polaroids were made to represent the ecstatic and excruciating range life brings to the surface. The series, made in 2015–2016, presents an obsessive, repetitive, affirming study of states of emotion. “After these wars and all the hardships I have suffered,” Fosso says, “I still have life, and photography helps me to continue on this path.”

From the series "Tati", 1997, The Lifeguard© Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris

“My body is effectively an intermediary, my face is only a mask, I am always ‘behind’ the subject,” Fosso states. “But once the photo is taken, what we see there is the subject himself – the one whose story I tell. In the picture, it’s him: it’s no longer me. When I introduce someone, I become that person.”

 

Asked if he considers his portraits to have a performative aspect given his preponderance for costumes, Fosso is quick to reframe the manner in which he sees his work. “I want to clarify that I don’t do theatre: I approach my work in an authentic way. What I mean by that is that I’m not ‘acting’. Of course I play a character, whose story I want to tell for the duration of a shot, but the ‘staging’ aspect is not what I find most essential… When I pose in front of the lens, I really am this person that I embody.” He negotiates between functioning as a conduit and relaying something autobiographical: “My body is effectively an intermediary, my face is only a mask, I am always ‘behind’ the subject,” Fosso states. “But once the photo is taken, what we see there is the subject himself – the one whose story I tell. In the picture, it’s him: it’s no longer me. When I introduce someone, I become that person.”

The blurring of the line between ‘self’ and ‘other’ even further is facilitated by the sartorialism shaping Fosso’s aesthetic. “I decide very meticulously on each detail of clothing, so that it better reflects the story I want to tell,” he says. But he adds: “I don’t have a fetishistic relationship to the clothes I use during the shots. Most of the time, the costumes are rented or lent from specialised shops for the duration of the series”. He cites the military costumes of his series ALLONZENFANS (2013) and the accessories for his 2003 series Le Rêve de Mon Grand-père as examples of stretching his personhood and imagination through donning a soldier’s uniform or a shaman’s robes. “I return these costumes,” he says, “just as I return to my own identity.”

The exception to this act of ‘borrowing’ was the elegant made-to-measure cream-coloured garment he had fashioned by Gammarelli – the official tailor of the Pope, located in Rome, operational since 1798 – for his 2017 series Black Pope. And, of course, the clothes he sported in his 70s-era series of debut studio self-portraits were his own: he bought them, or designed them, based upon what was trendy at the time among the youth in Bangui (which, in turn, was heavily influenced by the stylishly dressed iconic musicians of the epoch). 

Angela Davis, African Spirits, 2008 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris
Muhammad Ali, African Spirits, 2008 © Samuel Fosso, courtesy Jean Marc Patras, Paris

“My art is not political, I do not do politics.”

 

Fosso describes his current photographic practice as being prefaced by catching up on current events and news. Nonetheless, “My art is not political, I do not do politics,” Fosso emphasises. His photographic act is “to bear witness to the past for current and future generations, to fill in the gaps in the communal narrative.” He intends to transcend the “power games” of politics. “My work is more like that of a historian,” he insists. “I speak about history.” After committing to a theme when something stays with him, he creates precise lists of costumes, accessories, décor; he starts doing research and visiting archives to compare and contrast possible aesthetics and styles, examining different ‘realities’ from which to create his own mise-en-scène.

Asked if he would ever continue his signature 2008 African Spirits series with a new set of icons – having already spotlighted Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, and other prominent figures from 20th-century Black liberation movements with his personal twist – he admits: “It’s funny that you ask me that question, because I’m thinking of ways to complete the series.” He remains mum about further details: “I never talk about my projects in progress… I don’t like to disclose my series in advance.” Although deeply tethered to his origins, Fosso does not feel he folds into a specific community or territory, describing his approach as fundamentally global: “I can talk about China, Americans, Europeans as well as Africans.”

Black representation is unquestionably important to Fosso, but he gravitates towards a more expansive view of what a representational paradigm can encompass conceptually. “While the question of identity is, in certain aspects, central to my work, I would like – in a utopian way – for the cultural sector and for humanity to rise above these questions,” he says. “Each person has both so many indefinable particularities and universal aspects, which we all recognise in ourselves.

Samuelfosso.com

Samuel Fosso is on show at Huis Marseille from 10 December 2022 to 12 March 2023. 

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris) and the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm, Germany), with the support from the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne (Switzerland).

Sarah Moroz

Sarah Moroz is a Franco-American journalist and translator based in Paris. Her words have been published in the International New York Times, the Guardian, Vogue, NYLON, and others.