Samuel Fosso

Born 1962 in Kunmba (Cameroon), he lives and works in Bangui (Central African Republic).  

Samuel Fosso first became known for his photographic self-portraits. As a child survivor of the atrocities of Biafra, he joined his brother in Bangui. At the age of ten he was working as a cobbler. He then became an apprentice in a photographer’s studio. In these heady days of African independence, photography exerted a real pull on young people. Samuel Fosso opened his own photography studio at the age of thirteen! He used leftover bits of film from his commercial activity to do his own artistic work on the theme of the self-portrait. He began with the idea of sending images to the few surviving kinsfolk of his Ibo tribe. “When I was able to go and visit them, I continued the exercise so that my children could see their age changing,” he recalls.
 

At les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse, Fosso’s African Spirits series shows him slipping into the skin and the costume of his own black idols. Wearing, for example, the tail coat of the first African member of the Académie Française, Léopold Sedar Senghor, the poet, writer, first president of the Republic of Senegal (1960-1980) and creator of the concept of “negritude.” In this series infused with a sense of the sacred and deep respect, the artist evinces a new gravitas as he embodies great African figures such as Haile Selassie, the Negus and Patrice Lumumba, as well as American civil rights activists who symbolise the emancipation and grandeur of the Black people: Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X., Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis. Over the years, Fosso has thus gone from a narcissistic and exuberant “I” to “we” and a sense of collective history, that of a whole continent and beyond. The black nation stands proud, and Samuel Fosso is its prophet.