Exhibition: ‘Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

“There is something so infectious and engaging about these photographs, something that draws you into the transformative freedom of African identities.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 14th December, 2025 – 25th July, 2026

Curator: Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, with the assistance of Chiara M. Mannarino, Curatorial Assistant, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography

Air Afrique
DJIMA RECORDS
1969
Vinyl 45tour Mono
7 1/16 x 7 1/16″ (18 x 18cm)
Air Afrique Collective, courtesy of Lamine Diaoune,
Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko

Of being and becoming

Why do I love African photography so much after the “winds of decolonial change” swept through the continent which “saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and diaspora.”

Firstly, I love the vibrancy present in photographs of everyday life – at the club, with friends, dancing, drinking. I love the hairstyles, I love the fabrics, I love the way people are proud of themselves and their cultural heritage. Joy, love, exuberance, passion. There is something so infectious and engaging about these photographs, something that draws you into the transformative freedom of African identities.

Secondly, I love the studio photographs that enable the sitter to dream the great dreams of life, to imagine who they want to be before the camera. Here, in a symbiotic relationship between the photographer and the sitter, the “studio becomes a kind of imaginative enterprise. You can go and be who you are, or you can go and be who you want to be.” In Sanlé Sory’s studio his “portraits made possible a particular process of being and becoming for his sitters. He reflected the ideas that they wanted to communicate – whether to friends, lovers, strangers, or themselves.” (Gallery label) The resulting portrait made the sitter feel connected to a cosmopolitan world. Both a world of dreams and aspirations and Africans’ lived experiences and realities.

Thirdly, I love how the photographer turns the camera towards himself, conceptually enacting in a staged theatricality of becoming, envisioning himself as different personalities through the act of constructing identities. Heroes, travellers, intellectuals, philosophers and, in Samuel Fosso’s case, prominent figures from 20th-century Pan-African liberation and American civil rights movements. African spirits and activists, intellectuals, and political leaders who fought for Black emancipation across the globe.

Pan-African modes of image-making after the end of colonisation open up, as curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo so eloquently states, “dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility” where everything is possible in every/body. There is no wringing of the hands here, no use of colonial photographs rehashed for contemporary consumption, just a joy, joy, joy in present and future becoming.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Imagination is a Magic carpet
Upon which we may soar
To distant lands and climes
And even go beyond the moon
To any planet in the sky
If we came from nowhere here
Why can’t we go somewhere there?

.
Sun Ra, “Imagination,” 1970

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination showcases how photographic portraits fuel ideas of Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity. On view from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026, the exhibition considers the transatlantic call and response that constructed Africa as a political idea, due to the “winds of decolonial change” that swept the African continent in tandem with the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Ideas of Africa is the third exhibition organised at The Museum of Modern Art in celebration of the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from prolific collector Jean Pigozzi. The exhibition features core works from this gift, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans.

Text from The Museum of Modern Art website

Air Afrique
Balafon No. 1
1964
Magazine, softcover
10 5/8 x 8 1/4″ (27 x 21cm)
Air Afrique Collective, courtesy of Lamine Diaoune,
Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko

From 1961 to 2002, Air Afrique served as the official transnational carrier for francophone West and Central Africa, providing regular jet service throughout the continent and internationally. The airline was also deeply committed to the production of Pan-African arts and culture. It funded vinyl records, published books on African history, and produced the in-flight magazine Balafon, which reported on events across Africa and beyond. Twenty years after the airline shuttered, a Paris-based artist collective formed to revitalise the spirit of Air Afrique through design collaborations, film programs, and a magazine. Their collection of archival ephemera, on view here, comprises gifts and purchases from former Air Afrique staff.

Inspired by the international activities of Air Afrique, both past and present, this reading table presents issues of the airline’s in-flight magazine, Balafon, one of which features a portrait of the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé on its cover. This table also includes a selection of photobooks, catalogues, and scholarly publications, celebrating the circulation of images and ideas in Africa during the decolonial era. These books are additionally available to browse within the gallery, offering further directions for reading, thinking, dreaming, and imagining.

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Air Afrique
Balafon No. 3
1965
Magazine, softcover
10 5/8 x 8 1/4″ (27 x 21cm)
Air Afrique Collective, courtesy of Lamine Diaoune,
Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Djiby Kebe, Jeremy Konko

Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at right two Untitled photographs from the series African Spirits (2008, below) by Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)

Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Untitled from the series African Spirits
2008
Gelatin silver print
64 1/8 x 48 1/16″ (162.8 x 122cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Family of Man Fund

Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left photographs by Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001); and at right, two Untitled photographs from the series African Spirits (2008, below) by Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)

Artist, Silvia Rosi: African Spirit is a series of self-portraits where Fosso transforms himself into key figures of the Pan-African liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s.

I’m Silvia Rosi. I’m an artist working with photography and moving image.

Samuel Fosso started his career taking portraits of people in the studio, where there was always this act of constructing identities through props, poses, and the photographer’s imagination. At the end of each workday, Fosso would turn the camera toward himself.

In this series, he recreates these iconic photographs, taking on the faces of Angela Davis, of Martin Luther King, while at the same time remaining himself. For me, there’s this sense of recognition but also his own presence makes us question what it means to embody these figures.

The lighting and the poses and the composition echo this studio portrait tradition, but there’s always an element of theatricality that keeps you aware of the labor of becoming someone else. He neutralises the scene, removing the backdrop, and we’re forced to look at the subject that we have in front.

Turning the camera inwards can be really revolutionary. I think that’s something that deeply resonates with me, this idea of being in charge of my own representation and giving yourself complexity through images.

Text from the MoMA website

Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing five Untitled photographs from the series African Spirits (2008) by Samuel Fosso (French and Central African born Cameroon, b. 1962)

The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination showcases how photographic portraits fuel ideas of Pan-African subjectivity and solidarity. On view from December 14, 2025, through July 25, 2026, the exhibition considers the transatlantic call and response that constructed Africa as a political idea, due to the “winds of decolonial change” that swept the African continent in tandem with the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Ideas of Africa is the third exhibition organised at The Museum of Modern Art in celebration of the 2019 gift of modern and contemporary African art from prolific collector Jean Pigozzi. The exhibition features core works from this gift, alongside a selection of recent acquisitions and key loans. Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination is organised by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, with the assistance of Chiara M. Mannarino, Curatorial Assistant, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography.

Conceptually influenced by The Idea of Africa, a landmark publication by the late philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe (1941-2025), the exhibition brings together works by 20th-century photographers such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara, Sanlé Sory, and Ambroise Ngaimoko, who worked across key urban centers in West and Central Africa during the “golden age of African portraiture.” Images by James Barnor and Kwame Brathwaite illuminate Pan-African modes of image-making across the African diaspora. Works by contemporary artists of African descent, including Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, alongside ephemera selected from the archive of the artist collective Air Afrique, embody the physical circulation of these ideas across space and time.

“As we continue to witness transformative shifts in the global geopolitical order, it is instructive to revisit a moment in history that saw the disintegration of colonial territories and the formation of transnational solidarity across the African continent and diaspora. This exhibition locates dazzling modes of Pan-African possibility in images made by inventive photographers who registered and beckoned in new worlds,” says Oluremi C. Onabanjo.

Ideas of Africa features a reading room as a tribute to the aspirations of knowledge production and the proliferation of the photographic image in print media during the decolonial era. In the reading room, visitors can access a selection of historical and contemporary photobooks and publications.

On the occasion of the exhibition, MoMA is publishing a richly illustrated catalogue featuring a lead essay by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, contributions by poet Momtaza Mehri and film programmer Yasmina Price, and reproductions of key texts by Brent Hayes Edwards and V. Y. Mudimbe. 140 pages, 105 color illustrations. Hardcover, $50. ISBN: 978-1-63345-171-1.

Press release from The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left, Malick Sidibé Nuit de Noël (Happy Club) [Christmas Eve] (1963, below); and at second left, Malick Sidibé Regardez-Moi [Look at Me!] (1962, below)

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016)
Nuit de Noël (Happy Club) [Christmas Eve]
1963 (printed January 2006)
Gelatin silver print
Image: 39 x 39″ (99 x 99.1cm)
Sheet: 47 1/4 x 47 1/4″ (120 x 120cm)
Frame: 53 9/16 x 53 9/16″ (136 x 136cm)
Courtesy The Walther Collection, New York / Neu-Ulm

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016)
Regardez-Moi [Look at Me!]
1962 (printed January 2006)
Gelatin silver print
Image: 39 3/8 x 39″ (100 x 99cm)
Sheet: 47 1/4 x 47 1/4″ (120 x 120cm)
Frame: 52 3/16 x 52 3/16 x 1″ (132.5 x 132.5 x 2.5cm)
Courtesy The Walther Collection, New York / Neu-Ulm

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936–2016)
Boxeur (Boxer)
1966
Gelatin silver print
Image: 16 15/16 x 16 15/16″ (43 x 43 cm)
Frame: 27 9/16 x 27 9/16 x 9/16″ (70 x 70 x 1.5cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection

For Sidibé, the roving “eye of Bamako,” the city was his studio. Active during the 1960s and ’70s, Sidibé shot on 35mm film and often printed proofs of the exposures he took at weekend parties. He arranged them sequentially on pastel cardstock and displayed them at his studio so that clients might purchase souvenirs of their exploits. Sidibé’s images of youth culture emphatically pushed back against Mali’s normative state attitudes and expectations of decorum. Revelling in effusive gestures and strong poses, he deftly photographed a community full of elegance, style, and sensational flair that staked its claim on a connection to a global African Diaspora.

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016)
Nuit du 10 octobre 1970 (Night of October 10, 1970)
1970
Twenty-two gelatin silver prints mounted on paper
12 3/4 x 19 3/4″ (32.4 x 50.2cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Judith and Wm. Brian Little Fund

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016)
Untitled
July 28, 1973
Twenty-four gelatin silver prints mounted on paper
12 3/4 x 19 3/4″ (32.4 x 50.2cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Judith and Wm. Brian Little Fund

“This wind of change blowing through Africa … is no ordinary wind,” wrote Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1963. “It is a raging hurricane against which the old order cannot stand.” In the 1960s, independence movements swept across the African continent, resulting in the disintegration of colonial territories. These transformative struggles coincided with an exhilarating campaign for civil rights in the United States, forging a transatlantic call-and-response that established “Africa” as a political idea.

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination examines the role of portrait photography within this emerging sense of Pan-Africanism. It unites portraits by mid-century photographers from across West and Central Africa and works by contemporary artists of African descent, illuminating different modes of image making and forms of transnational solidarity. As the art historian Kobena Mercer has argued, “‘Africa’ has never been a static entity, confined to the boundaries of geography, but has always had a diasporic dimension.” Embedded within the exhibition is a reading room featuring a selection of photobooks, alongside archival ephemera from the Paris-based collective Air Afrique. Following in the wake of the eponymous international airline, the group has continued the circulation of Pan-African culture and ideas into the present day.

Conceptually influenced by the late philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe’s book The Idea of Africa (1994), in which he exposes Western views of Africa as politicised constructions, this exhibition demonstrates how African photographers grappled with Africa as a political idea in their own ways. Presenting subjects for whom the personal was undeniably political, their images assert photography’s unique potential to creatively reflect our surroundings and beckon new worlds. At a time when profound shifts are once again transforming the global geopolitical order, Ideas of Africa attests to the enduring relevance of these themes.

Gallery text from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left the work of Silvia Rosi (below); and at right, Njideka Akunyili Crosby And We Begin to Let Go (2013, below)

Silvia Rosi (Togolese and Italian, b. 1992)
Disintegrata di profilo (Disintegrated in Profile)
2024
Inkjet print
31 1/2 x 31 1/2″ (80 x 80cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Carl Jacobs Fund

Rosi has said, “I’m not just performing, but reflecting on history.” Through photographic self-portraits, the artist examines personal, familial, and national narratives of migration, memory, and belonging. Deeply informed by the history of West African studio portraiture, Rosi’s images elegantly synthesise the formal strategies of mid-century African photographers, including many of those represented in this exhibition. Rosi often reenacts moments from her family’s past. Disintegrated Waiting, for instance, recalls when her mother first arrived in Italy from Togo. “She once said, ‘I used to be integrated, now I’m disintegrated,'” the artist shared. “To me this phrase is … an expression of the experience of diaspora.”

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Silvia Rosi (Togolese and Italian, b. 1992)
Sposa italiana disintegrata (Disintegrated Italian Wife)
2024
Inkjet print
31 1/2 x 31 1/2″ (80 x 80cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Carl Jacobs Fund

Njideka Akunyili Crosby (Nigerian, born 1983)
And We Begin to Let Go
2013
Acrylic, acetone transfers, charcoal, pastel, marble dust, and
collage on paper
Sheet: 84 x 105″ (213.4 x 266.7cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Promised gift of Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine Farley

Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby moved to the US at the age of 17 (after winning the green card lottery in her home town) to train as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and, later, Yale University. Here, as in many of her portraits, Crosby gives an intimate portrayal of her interracial marriage and day-to-day life in America. She combines photo-transfer processes with painting and collaged fabrics, fusing Nigerian and American materials, images, and cultural traditions.

In her practice, Akunyili Crosby meditates on familial life within a transcultural context. Her large-scale compositions of everyday domestic scenes synthesise drawing, painting, printmaking, and photography. And We Begin to Let Go depicts the artist and her husband, who leans over her shoulder. To make it, Akunyili Crosby drew from Nigerian print media publications and her family’s photographic archive. She united these images’ varied photographic textures through the same formal treatment: acetone transfer, a printmaking technique through which a printed image is transferred onto another surface using an acetone solvent. Images of smiling faces, elaborate coifs, and patterned clothing suffuse the picture plane, accruing on the surfaces this marital encounter.

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Installation view of the exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, December 2025 – July 2026 showing at left, Njideka Akunyili Crosby And We Begin to Let Go (2013, above); and at centre, Kwame Brathwaite Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs) (1964-1968, below)

Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Sikolo with Carolee Prince Designs)
1964-1968
Inkjet print, printed 2024
30 x 30″ (76.2 x 76.2cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography Fund

Brathwaite, for whom photography functioned at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and cultural expression, rhythmically documented jazz scenes in Harlem and the Bronx. In 1956 he cofounded the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS) in the South Bronx, where he made structured portraits of the Grandassa Models, a group of women who were part of the Black Is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and ’70s. “Black Is Beautiful was my directive … It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe,” Brathwaite said. “I focused on perfecting my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas, and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liberation. … Oppression still exists today, and we must keep fighting, keep on pushing until we are free.”

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Nomsa with Earrings)
1964-1968
Inkjet print, printed 2024
15 x 15″ (38.1 x 38.1cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography Fund

Felix Akinniran Olunloyo (Nigerian)
Untitled
c. 1950-1970
Gelatin silver print
5 1/2 x 3 9/16″ (13.9 x 9cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi

Oumar Ka (Senegalese, 1930-2020)
Untitled (Two Women with Thatched Roof House)
1959-1968
Gelatin silver print, printed 2024
17 × 17″ (43.2 × 43.2 cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi in honor of Darren Walker

Historian, Giulia Paoletti: Getting a portrait done was a serious business, because this single portrait would circulate and stand for this person.

My name is Giulia Paoletti, and I am a researcher on photography and modern art in Africa.

In 1959, Oumar Ka met a photographer who gave him a camera, so he learned by himself. Photography in Senegal was extremely popular. Dozens and dozens of studios existed. But he started going from village to village taking portraits, and then he would go home, develop the negatives, and return the following week with the prints. So, you meet his sitters by their own home, in towns, sometimes in this open landscape. And that is a major distinction from other photographers who worked in a studio.

In this photograph, we see two young women in matching outfits, posing for the camera against a white backdrop attached to this thatched-roof house. The landscape, the architecture, the sky – this is part of who they are and how they want to be perceived. They’re young, they’re serious, they’re confident.

As Senegal is shifting from a colonised place to an independent country, these are sitters that are making visible their experience of modernisation, which looked very different from the experience if someone lived in the capital city. There is often this tendency to flatten what is African modernity, and instead it’s important to show the variety of experiences and subjects at the time.

Text from the MoMA website

Sanlé Sory (Burkinabé, b. 1943)
L’Intellectuel (The Intellectual)
1970-85
Gelatin silver print
8 1/8 x 8 1/8″ (20.6 x 20.6cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography Fund

“Everyone chooses what they want in photography,” Sory once said. First opening his studio, Volta Photo, in Bobo-Dioulasso, Upper Volta (present-day Burkina Faso), in 1960, Sory organised bals poussières (or “dust balls,” named after the dirt clouds that dancers kicked up) in the fields of the nearby Kou Valley. The sound of his Multiblitz flash accompanied the percussion at parties, setting an elusive tone for his reportage de nuit (nighttime journalism). At Volta Photo, Sory’s portraits made possible a particular process of being and becoming for his sitters. He reflected the ideas that they wanted to communicate – whether to friends, lovers, strangers, or themselves.

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Sanlé Sory (Burkinabé, b. 1943)
Le Voyageur (The Traveller)
1970-1985
Gelatin silver print
8 1/8 x 8 1/8″ (20.6 x 20.6cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Committee on Photography Fund

Historian, Antawan I. Byrd: One of the fundamental principles of studio portraiture, especially as it developed in West Africa, is that the studio becomes a kind of imaginative enterprise. You can go and be who you are, or you can go and be who you want to be.

Hello, I’m Antawan I. Byrd. I am a curator, and my research focuses on photography in West Africa during the mid-20th century.

Sanlé Sory opened up his own photography studio in Bobo-Dioulasso, one of the major cities in present-day Burkina Faso. This is a time right after independence, in 1960, and so there is this sense of optimism and hope about the sovereign nation.

Sory once remarked, “Fun is central to my work.” I think he’s speaking about the dynamics of collaboration. Oftentimes, clients would line up outside of the studio, and Sory would have a sort of menu that they can choose from. They could point and say, “Sory, I’d like this portrait here, and I’d like to pose with that prop there.”

Here we’re looking at six portraits, and they’re assuming different personalities. There’s one figure who appears as the intellectual, reading a newspaper. Another figure standing powerfully with his hands in the air as if he’s a boxer. There’s another wielding a Air Afrique briefcase, suggesting that he is a traveller.

When we think about the studio as a kind of imaginative space, it’s possible that the figure with the briefcase has just come back from a trip. But it’s entirely possible that he’s never left Bobo-Dioulasso at all, and holding that briefcase is a way to signal his ambition to travel.

Text from the MoMA website

J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930-2014)
Brush Eko Bridge
1973
Two gelatin silver prints
Each 11 x 8″ (27.9 x 20.3cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Family of Man Fund

In 1968 Ojeikere embarked on a monumental project to document the myriad hairstyles worn by women across a newly independent Nigeria. Over the next seven years, he amassed more than one thousand photographs. Together, these rigorously composed images form a portrait of a nation undergoing social and physical transformation – with feminine beauty standards providing the ultimate symbol. In Brush Eko Bridge, clean lines appear across a woman’s carefully parted scalp, her hair threaded to sculptural effect. In profile her hairdo evokes the highways and architectural developments that were then populating the Lagos skyline.

Gallery label from Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, 2025

Historian, Antawan I. Byrd: The hairstyles project is often described as Ojeikere’s most ambitious body of work, and it’s a body of work that he pursued over nearly half a century.

My name’s Antawan Byrd. I’m an art historian and curator based in Chicago.

J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere evolved as a photographer alongside major political shifts in Nigerian history. 1960 is when the country attains independence from British rule. Ojeikere began to attend many of the festivals that were celebrating traditional culture. Hair design was coming back into fashion after a long period of being regarded as retrograde by the colonial government. It was at one of those festivals that he began to make his earliest images of Nigerian hairstyles.

He was so fascinated by the nuances of the designs as you encounter them from different angles. Some of the hair designs are straightforward cornrow styles, whereas others are realised through the use of thread that’s been wrapped around strands of hair.

Many of the hair designs carry references to contemporary bridges and buildings in terms of their architectural design. That’s in part because after independence, the nation is being built, the skyline is being built, the hairstyles are being built. And so I think for Ojeikere, he was conscious of the multiplicity of changes that were happening. It’s simultaneously about hair and the tradition of hair, and yet it’s also about architecture and commerce and trade.

Text from the MoMA website

James Barnor (Ghanaian, born 1929)
Ever Young Studio, Accra
c. 1954-1959
Gelatin silver print, printed 2018-20
9 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (24.1 x 24.1cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Heidi and Richard Rieger

Artist, James Barnor: Everything that happened in Accra passed through my street, and I call myself Lucky Jim. Anything that was happening, I was there.

I’m James Barnor. I was born on the 6th of June 1929. I had witnessed photography from a very small age because my mother’s brother was a professional photographer. My cousin was practicing in Accra, in Ghana. Because it was in the family, I must have thought, “Ah, this is something I could do in the future.”

Portraiture was number one. People are more important than places. I love people. ’53, I got a studio and I called it Ever Young. I thought about making people young, or even [laughs] better than they were before.

My sister was a nurse, and so I knew some nurses, and Evelyn was at the nursing training college. This is a portrait that I took of her. I had so many different backgrounds. And this was actually drawn on the wall. This is a sky. You can see the clouds. When I look at the different tones, from the white highlight to the black of the hair, it’s so very nice. This is a picture that I like very much.

I’m lucky to be alive and to be telling the story about my work. The inspiration that people get from my work will carry on and inspire others to develop their own way. The future is going to be grander because of photography.

Text from the MoMA website

James Barnor (Ghanaian, b. 1929)
Portrait of Evelyn Abbew, Ever Young Studio, Accra
c. 1954-1959
Gelatin silver print, printed 2018-2020
9 1/2 x 9 1/2″ (24.1 x 24.1cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Acquired through the generosity of Ruth Nordenbrook

Jean Depara (Congolese born Angola, 1928-1997)
Un Jazzeur (Jazzman)
1960
Gelatin silver print, printed later
23 x 19″ (58.4 x 48.3cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi

Historian, Sandrine Colard: Depara’s images, when you look at them, you see mostly people partying at nighttime or in his studio. So you don’t directly see people articulating a political discourse, but their bodies are.

My name is Sandrine Colard, and I’m a historian of African art and photography.

Jean Depara was living in Léopoldville, which will become Kinshasa. It was the capital of the Belgian Congo, seen as a very modern city for Africa at that time.

This is a portrait of a Black man in a suit and tie. The way the arms of this man are folded upon themselves – he’s touching himself in a delicate way. Under a colonial system, Black men are seen as a workforce. Your body is to be put into service of colonial power, and so the very fact of dressing up, this delicate relationship to his own body – for pleasure, enjoyment, beauty – is just something that’s radically opposing the construction of Black masculinity in the colonial Congo.

The fact that it’s also entitled Jazzeur makes a connection with music. Jazz is a diasporic language throughout the world, and a musician is definitely not someone who is enlisted into the colonial economy. All of that together, I would say, is really a sort of different portrait being constructed for Congolese masculinity at that time.

Text from the MoMA website

Jean Depara (Congolese, born Angola, 1928-1997)
Una Moziki
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print, printed later
23 x 19″ (58.4 x 48.3cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi

Jean Depara (Congolese, born Angola, 1928-1997)
Le Progrès (The Progress)
1975
Gelatin silver print, printed later
15 3/4 x 11 13/16″ (40 x 30cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi

Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001)
Untitled
1954
Gelatin silver print, printed later
46 15/16 x 65 7/8″ (119.2 x 167.3cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection. Gift of Jean Pigozzi

Introduction

Curator, Oluremi C. Onabanjo: I’m Oluremi Onabanjo. I’m the Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.

This exhibition includes some of the most iconic image-makers working across cities in West and Central Africa, at a moment when the continent was transitioning from European colonial powers to independent nations run by Africans themselves. Within this context, people are really interested in what it means to be themselves. What are the dreams you have, the places you want to go? How do you see yourself? Photographic portraits are the perfect way to wrestle with these questions.

And that’s important for understanding the great Seydou Keïta, who was working in Bamako, in French Sudan, but which became, in 1960, an independent Mali. People who came to Keïta’s studio were interested in being seen as connected to a cosmopolitan world. Keïta was extremely proud of making people look beautiful. He used sunlight for all of his photographs. He had a number of props – watches, radios, rings – to gesture to their investment in this global imaginary that they are constructing with Keïta.

With this exhibition, I encourage you to really think about how a portrait is made. These are deliberately constructed compositions, and when we are attentive to those moves, we might see things anew.

Text from the MoMA website

Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001)
Untitled (Bamako)
1956-1957
Gelatin silver print, printed 1997
15 9/16 x 22 1/8″ (39.5 x 56.2cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Family of Man Fund

Seydou Keïta (Malian, 1923-2001)
Untitled
1956
Modern gelatin silver print
Image: 22 3/8 x 15 11/16″ (56.8 x 39.8cm)
Frame: 30 3/16 x 23 7/16″ (76.7 x 59.6cm)
Sheet: 23 7/8 x 19 15/16″ (60.7 x 50.7cm)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Jean Pigozzi African Art Collection

Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination catalogue cover

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Exhibition: ‘Samuel Fosso: The Man with a Thousand Faces’ at The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Burlafingen, Germany

Exhibition dates: 29th May – 20th November, 2022

Curators: Clothilde Morette, Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, and Clara Stratmann

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
70’s Lifestyle
1974-1978

“Samuel Fosso was only 13 years old when he started his own photography studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, in September 1975. The previous year, he had carried out a five-month-long apprenticeship with a local photographer, thanks to the support of his uncle’s wife… [his uncle] bought him a large camera in Cameroon and agreed to open a photography studio for him. Fosso named it Studio Photo National, to reflect how the Central African Republic had gained independence from France in 1960.” (Press release)

In the evening, his commercial work complete, he would finish off a Kodak roll by taking staged self-portraits. Can you imagine being a precocious 13 year-old, running your own commercial studio, and then at the end of the day creating sets and costumes and taking on roles to reflect his interest in African and Black American style. As a young man he is finding his own identity through pose and play. “Using the camera as a mirror, he takes on and explores various roles. It’s a game of trying on identities that is familiar to teenagers in particular the world over, a game we play in an attempt to find ourselves, or rather to construct an individual identity.”1 It’s not just playing dress ups or charades: the photographs are an exciting investigation into the desire to find oneself, as an artist and as a human being. Whom am I, who can I be in this life?

Fast forward 20 years or so, and “Tati, the French, low-budget department store, commissioned Fosso, as well as the eminent Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, to make a group of self-portraits recreating the African photo-studio environment. Upon learning that Keïta and Sidibé had already made their pictures in black-and-white, Fosso asked if he could make his in colour. His goal was to take a new direction in his work and capture a different mood from the images associated with African photography.” (press release) Fosso’s goal was to register a different mood of the African imagination, and not the images that were already associated with African photography.

This is where it takes the courage of your own convictions, an inherent sense of your creativity as an artist, and respect for yourself as a human being … to strike out and do something different from everyone else, to recognise the chance of taking a different path, to use your imagination to create something fresh and new. Fosso understood this was a crossroads in his life. He could carry on down the same path as Keïta and Sidibé or he could take a chance and strike out on his own, to create “a unique and long-term photographic project that critically and playfully examines identity, sexuality, gender, and African self-representation” through “self-portraiture and performative photography, transforming his body and envisioning compelling variations of postcolonial African identities.”

Fosso was on his way. More insightful series followed which reflect the artist’s personal and artistic trajectory and global politics, which oscillate between personal introspection and collective narratives: reenacting historical photos of pan-African liberation and civil rights movement leaders and celebrities, performing an imaginary Black Pope, embodying Mao Zedong in the series Emperor of Africa which highlights the neo-colonial relationship between China and debt-ridden African countries, and posing as members of the French colonial military sporting uniforms from the First and Second World War.

“By centering himself in performative photographic processes, Fosso’s ideas transcend mere self-representation or self-reflection to encompass explorations of what Okwui Enwezor called “self-constituted theatre of postcolonial identity.” In this “theatre,” there is a manifestation of the paradox of guise and masking, where Fosso does not attempt to recreate an individual but the idea of that person as “characters in a larger human drama.”” (Press release)

By placing himself at the centre of the theatre of postcolonial identity, and at the centre of (sometimes tragic) human dramas, the artist acts (it being theatre), and performs as a prosopopoeia (Greek) which is a rhetorical device (one which conveys a meaning with the goal of persuading the viewer towards considering a topic from a perspective), in which the artist communicates to the audience by speaking as another person. The term literally derives from the Greek roots prósopon “face, person”, and poiéin “to make, to do;”. Prosopopoeiae are used mostly to give another perspective on the action being described.2

Fosso is both himself and the Black Pope; Fosso is himself and he is also the Chairman. Indeed, Fosso offers a complex conceptual framework in order / in disorder, to understand alternative histories of postcolonial identity. What if there was a Black Pope? What if the Chinese bankroll the finances of African governments and then make them subservient to the will of the Chinese government? How are the privileges of colonial occupation and disenfranchisement being played out on Black bodies and Black cultures even to this day?

Through his different personas the artist allows himself to perform what would otherwise be hidden from view, crossing the threshold between reality and fiction. Crossing such a threshold through performative photography and ritual, “makes possible the emergence of a space of play which asserts that the world does not express a determinate and final order but is infinitely open to the emergence of new… forms of self-organization”3

New forms of identity that critique colonial and world histories. In this sense, Fosso is saying that African creativity and representation matters.

“So, when you ask me why I privilege my self-portraits, I believe the answer is rooted in the condition of my life and the meaning of self-representation.”

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anonymous. Press release from the exhibition Ladies and Gentlemen: The Camera as a Mirror at the Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden, February – April 2012. Press release

2/ See Anonymous. “Prosopopoeia,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 12/11/2022

3/ Massie, Pascal. “Masks and the Space of Play,” in Research in Phenomenology Vol. 48, No. 1 (Feb 2018), p. 119. Abstract. Brill publishers.

Many thankx to The Walther Collection for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All images Courtesy of The Walther Collection.

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
70’s Lifestyle
1974-1978

“My initial encounter with photographic images outside of the Central African Republic was purely through pictures in magazines, brought by young American Peace Corps volunteers who came to the Central African Republic to visit Pygmies. I was especially excited by the images of the African Americans and their sense of style. I was also very much taken with the style of the popular singer and musician Prince Nico Mbarga, who was very hot around West Africa in 1976 and 1977 with his record Sweet Mother. I wanted to replicate these two stylistic approaches in the studio with me, posing as a model.”

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
70’s Lifestyle
1974-1978

Samuel Fosso was only 13 years old when he started his own photography studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, in September 1975. The previous year, he had carried out a five-month-long apprenticeship with a local photographer, thanks to the support of his uncle’s wife. Acknowledging his nephew’s precocious talent, Fosso’s uncle, a cobbler with whom he was living, bought him a large camera in Cameroon and agreed to open a photography studio for him. Fosso named it Studio Photo National, to reflect how the Central African Republic had gained independence from France in 1960.

Besides photographing families and friends and taking people’s passport photos, he captured popular occasions, weddings, baptisms and ceremonies. In the evening, his commercial work complete, he would finish off a Kodak roll by taking staged self-portraits. “If I hadn’t finished the film, I used the last two or three for my own account, and I benefited from that to make my own works,” says Fosso when we meet at the home of his long-standing agent, Jean-Marc Patras, in Paris.

There were two other reasons why Fosso became impassioned about photography. One was that he desperately wanted to send photographs of himself to his grandmother in Nigeria. “Whenever I would make my self-portraits, I would send one picture to my grandmother to reassure her that everything was going well for me and keep one for myself,” Fosso says. The other reason is linked to his early infancy. Born in 1962 in Kumba, south-western Cameroon, to Nigerian parents of Igbo ethnicity, Fosso was born partly paralysed. His mother took him to Nigeria – where his grandfather was a ‘native doctor’, or ‘priest healer’ – to be cured, so he could walk normally. He remained there with his grandparents during the Biafran War, during which time his mother died. After the war ended, his uncle collected him and the pair returned to Cameroon for one year before moving to Bangui.

Fosso had missed out on the tradition of being photographed as a three-month-old baby due to his health condition. In an interview with the late Okwui Enwezor (the influential Nigerian-born curator, for a forthcoming Steidl monographic book, Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait), Fosso recounts: “Even though my mother believed I was a normal child, despite the fact that I was paralysed, there was still no photograph commissioned, even after one year, because my father did not see the need to waste money on a paralysed child. So, when you ask me why I privilege my self-portraits, I believe the answer is rooted in the condition of my life and the meaning of self-representation.”

As if to compensate for what had been denied to him, Fosso began asserting his identity and marking his presence, existence and vitality for life by experimenting with self-portraiture, nurturing the freedom this offered. It is a selection of these seminal photographs, titled Autoportrait/Self-portrait from 70s Lifestyle (1975-1978), made between the ages of 13-16… They show the young, slim-framed Fosso striking poses in front of theatrical backdrops and wearing elegant outfits made by a local tailor with fabrics he had purchased. In one image, Fosso – dressed in a white shirt, dark flared trousers and patterned jacket – is bowing slightly, a smile across his face, as if imagining that he is about to meet someone. In others, he has gloved hands on his hips, sporting just a pair of underpants, or he dons tasselled trousers and high-heeled boots.

For inspiration for his looks, Fosso would peruse catalogues, magazines and album covers. “I used American magazines, especially photos of black musicians like James Brown, and showed the magazine pictures to the tailor,” he recalls. “During the colonial years, [African] ministers were obliged to wear a suit and tie, so I chose to make seven photos of me wearing suits like the French. I would also design the décor.” Providing an insight into Fosso’s studio, the photographs show a large picture of Bangui on the wall and several curtains being used for backgrounds. They also offer a social commentary about modern life in Bangui during the post-independence years. Coincidentally, Fosso was making these works at the same time as Cindy Sherman was developing her Murder Mystery series (1976) and Bus Riders (1976) in New Jersey before her iconic Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980). In a similar vein, Fosso was becoming his own director and character, developing his form of self-expression.

Anna Sansom. “Me, Myself & I,” on the 1854 photography website 3 May 2020 [Online] Cited 23/10/2022

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
70’s Lifestyle
1974-1978

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
La femme américaine libérée des années 70 (The Liberated American Woman of the 1970s)
1997
From the series Tati

“That’s how my Tati series (1997) began, because I did not want to go back to the black-and-white style as Keïta and Sidibé had done for their Tati commissions. Since there were three African photographers, I wanted my project to register a different mood of the African imagination, and not the images that were already associated with African photography. My goal was to take a new direction in my work.”

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Le Rocker (The Rocker)
1997
From the series Tati

Three years later, Tati, the French, low-budget department store, commissioned Fosso, as well as the eminent Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, to make a group of self-portraits recreating the African photo-studio environment. Upon learning that Keïta and Sidibé had already made their pictures in black-and-white, Fosso asked if he could make his in colour. His goal was to take a new direction in his work and capture a different mood from the images associated with African photography.

In each photograph in the Tati (1997) series, Fosso changes like a chameleon, masquerading as various figures, exploring issues around gender and stereotypes. His image titled The Chief (the one who sold Africa to the colonists), above, which was printed on the cover of the catalogue of the travelling exhibition, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2004-2007), questions the role of African chiefs in the slave trade. Fosso also transforms himself into a liberated woman, wearing brightly coloured trousers, high heels and a Panama hat, a bourgeois woman in a sequinned top holding a white fur, and to a sailor.

How did people react to these pictures? “People asked if I was homosexual and why I wanted to disguise myself as a woman; wearing women’s clothes was taboo,” he replies. “Now the mentality is changing a bit. Now people are asking why I wanted to do it. I thought of doing something about how black Americans were liberated in the 1960s and 70s, and the liberated woman.”

Anna Sansom. “Me, Myself & I,” on the 1854 photography website 3 May 2020 [Online] Cited 23/10/2022

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
The Chief (who sold Africa to the Colonists)
1997
From the series Tati

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
The Golfer
1997
From the series Tati

Conceptual Framework

The Walther Collection presents a retrospective exhibition of photographic works by Samuel Fosso (b. 1962), one of the most renowned contemporary African artists working today. Spanning his five-decade career, Samuel Fosso: The Man with a Thousand Faces revisits bodies of work that explore issues central to the contemporary art scene. The exhibition retraces a career that oscillates between personal introspection and collective narratives through major series and lesser-known works from his youth.

Since the mid-1970s, Samuel Fosso has dedicated his artistic practice to self-portraiture and performative photography, transforming his body and envisioning compelling variations of postcolonial African identities. His early studio experiments and later series created innovative imagery that questioned ethnographic views of Africa as well as the economic imperatives of studio portraiture. Samuel Fosso: The Man with a Thousand Faces is presented across two galleries of The Walther Collection’s White Cube, bringing together a selection of works from all the artist’s series: early studio photography from the 1970s to 1990s is exhibited in the upper gallery and later works reflecting the artist’s personal and artistic trajectory and global politics are shown in the main gallery space.

Fosso’s work reflects the shifts that occurred in the history of photography in Africa when Africans began to turn the camera onto themselves and began to visualise and embody postcolonial perspectives. In 1975, at the age of thirteen, Fosso opened his Studio Photo Nationale in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. By day he photographed paying clientele, highlighting their fashion and individual styles, depicting them in sometimes exuberant poses. At night, he focused the camera on himself. Fosso’s expressive black-and-white self-portraits from the 1970s reference West African popular culture, formulating a unique and long-term photographic project that critically and playfully examines identity, sexuality, gender, and African self-representation.

Another significant theme that runs through Fosso’s oeuvre is fashion as a powerful tool for expression, transformation, and image-making. In his words, ‘clothes help me tell the character’s story and share their own emotions… but most of all the clothes help me understand them.’ Several of his series examine how self-styling and (manipulation of) the mass media have shaped the representation of social and political ideals and selves.

While the series Tati (1997) investigates the transformative power of fashion through satirical representation, other photo essays such as Mémoire d’un ami (2000) explore themes of memory and ritual. Reconstructing a night in 1997, when the artist’s friend and neighbour was murdered by armed militia in Bangui, Fosso reflects on global socio-political issues through his photographic performance with astonishing vulnerability.

For the series African Spirits (2008), Fosso reenacted historical photos of pan-African liberation and civil rights movement leaders and celebrities, examining the power of iconography. The African and African-American figures represented in the series, like Angela Davis, Malcom X or Haile Selassie, are instantly recognisable through their iconic fashion and adopted poses, their masterful utilisation of self-styling imbuing them with undeniable power to create social and political impact.

Five years later, Fosso embodies Mao Zedong in the series Emperor of Africa (2013), manifesting the relationship between style and image again in a powerful project of political portraits, while at the same time highlighting the neo-colonial relationship between China and debt-ridden African countries.

The selection of two diptychs from the series ALLONZENFANS (2013) depicts Fosso’s intervention into the fraught history of France’s relationship with its former colonies. Fosso poses as members of the military sporting uniforms from the First and Second World War, alternating between a stern-looking soldier at attention and a smiling soldier at ease, drafted for the French regiments. Like African Spirits and Emperor of Africa, ALLONZENFANS illustrates the artist’s ongoing engagement with specific episodes of Africa’s and Europe’s history.

With the Black Pope (2017), Fosso confronts politics of religion between Europe and Africa, addressing the fact that, despite high populations of Roman Catholics on the continent, there has never been a pope of African heritage. While African Catholics hoped that this would be corrected during the 2013 conclave without success, Fosso’s evocative body of work created four years later, teases our imagination, and invites us to consider the improbable event of an African on the papal seat.

By presenting a wide spectrum of Fosso’s work, this comprehensive retrospective offers generous insight into how the artist’s practice deviates sharply from West African studio photography traditions established by Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé during the 1950s and 1960s – from his early work examining postcolonial African society’s burgeoning desires to his later conceptual work which explores the way photographs travel the world and change meaning over time. By centering himself in performative photographic processes, Fosso’s ideas transcend mere self-representation or self-reflection to encompass explorations of what Okwui Enwezor called “self-constituted theatre of postcolonial identity.” In this “theatre,” there is a manifestation of the paradox of guise and masking, where Fosso does not attempt to recreate an individual but the idea of that person as “characters in a larger human drama.”

Samuel Fosso was born in Kumba, Cameroon, in 1962 and raised in Nigeria. He fled the Biafran War as an adolescent, and in 1972 was taken in by his uncle in Bangui in the Central African Republic. After learning about photography from a neighbour, he set up his own photo studio at the age of 13.

Fosso was awarded the Afrique en Création prize in 1995 and was the recipient of the prestigious Prince Claus Award in 2001. His self-portraits are represented in the collections of international museums such as Tate Gallery in London, Centre Pompidou and musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. In 2017, a solo exhibition of his work was held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2020, the monograph Autoportrait, the first comprehensive survey of Fosso’s photographs was published by Steidl and The Walther Collection. Samuel Fosso lives and works between Nigeria and France.

Publications

On the occasion of the retrospective Samuel Fosso at MEP in 2021, Steidl has published a French edition of Autoportrait, the first comprehensive survey of Samuel Fosso’s oeuvre – originally co-published by The Walther Collection in 2020 – with essays and research by leading scholars and writers. Edited by Okwui Enwezor, it includes contributions by Quentin Bajac, Simon Baker, Yves Chatap, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Jean Marc Patras, Terry Smith, Claire Staebler, James Thomas, and Artur Walther, as well as an in-depth conversation between Samuel Fosso and Okwui Enwezor.

SIXSIXSIX consists of 666 large-format Polaroid self-portraits, produced in an intensive process by Samuel Fosso with a small team in his Paris studio in 2015 and 2016. Shot against the same rich, coloured backdrop, these striking photographs depart from Fosso’s earlier self-portraits through their understated and stripped-back approach. Fosso’s challenge was to create 666 self-portraits each with a different bodily expression, reminding us of the link between his performances and photography. The publication opens with a conversation between Fosso and curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist.

About the Exhibition

Samuel Fosso: The Man with a Thousand Faces is a touring exhibition organised by the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris) in collaboration with The Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm) and Huis Marseille (Amsterdam), with the support of Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.

Text from The Walther Collection website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Mémoire d’un ami
2000

“When I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake. It’s not a subject or an object; it’s one more human being. I link my body to this figure, because I want to translate its history.”

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Mémoire d’un ami
2000

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Self-Portrait (Martin Luther King, Jr.)
2008
From the series African Spirits

“I see slavery as connected to all these questions of freedom, liberation, colonialism, and power. To me, slavery was the source, and I wanted to deal with it in a really deep way. My goal was to restage key images and figures in this history from King during the American civil rights movement to Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Aimé Césaire during the independence and liberation of Africa. To my mind, all these struggles had one thing in common, and that is the history of slavery. And these figures were committed to the idea of freedom for black people in order to reclaim their culture and human dignity. This was the underlying concept of African Spirits.“

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Self-Portrait (Angela Davis)
2008
From the series African Spirits

Fosso’s quest to pay homage to historical, political figures that had fought for black civil rights became more precise in his black-and-white series, African Spirits (2008), produced in Patras’ former gallery in Paris. Marking a decisive shift in direction, each photograph is based on a specific image of one of Fosso’s heroes that he faithfully reinterpreted, casting himself as a different character each time. This involved creating elaborate backdrops, hiring costumes and imitating facial expressions. In one, Fosso interprets Martin Luther King Jr’s mugshot following King’s arrest in Alabama in 1956 for his leadership role in the Montgomery bus boycott. Others see him assuming the identities of African-Americans such as Muhammad Ali and the political activist Angela Davis (above), African leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who co-founded the Négritude movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans, and Keïta.

Anna Sansom. “Me, Myself & I,” on the 1854 photography website 3 May 2020 [Online] Cited 23/10/2022

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Self-Portrait (Muhammad Ali)
2008
From the series African Spirits

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Self-Portrait (Malcolm X)
2008
From the series African Spirits

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Emperor of Africa
2013
From the series Emperor of Africa

“We cannot accept, because of Chinese money, the destruction of our environment. We must also preserve it for our children and for generations to come. This is what I wanted to say in Lagos, in 2013, on the occasion of my first exhibition in Nigeria, where my series Emperor of Africa was also presented for the first time. In this series, Mao is the emperor of this Africa that the Chinese have come to invade. It is the question of economic independence which arises after that of political independence.”

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Emperor of Africa
2013
From the series Emperor of Africa

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
ALLONZENFANS
2013

“I want to show the black man’s relationship to the power that oppresses him.”

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
ALLONZENFANS
2013

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Black Pope
2017

“Samuel Fosso’s Black Pope explores the way religion and its symbols and objects that are used to create the narrative of a papal figure are so removed from the African context and culture that it almost promotes this idea of whiteness and white supremacy. In the history of the papacy, there has never been a black pope, while today the greatest number of Roman Catholics is actually in Africa.”

Azu Nwagbogu, 2017

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Black Pope
2017

Next came the series Allonzenfans (2013), in which Fosso reflects upon how France conscripted men from its West African colonies to fight in the First and Second World Wars, followed by Black Pope (2017), above. For the latter, Fosso was awarded the Infinity Art Award 2018 from the International Centre of Photography in New York. At the Rencontres de Bamako in 2017, one enlarged image from the series was presented alongside contact sheets comprising dozens of shots of Fosso enacting the Pope. In total, 70 unique portraits are being produced, according to Patras. In some, Fosso is reading the Bible, praying or holding the papal ferula while standing on a meteorite – an evident pun on Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture, La Nona Ora (1999), an effigy of Pope John Paul II being crushed by a meteorite. The series alludes to Fosso’s hope that one day the Catholic Church will have a black pope. “I asked myself why there has never been a black pope, but now there’s been a Polish pope [John Paul II], a German pope [Benedict XVI] and now a pope from South America [Francis], so perhaps one day there’ll be a black pope,” Fosso says.

Anna Sansom. “Me, Myself & I,” on the 1854 photography website 3 May 2020 [Online] Cited 23/10/2022

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
Black Pope
2017

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
SIXSIXSIX
2020
Polaroid

“It’s neither the body that smiles, nor the body that cries, but a representation of life and all the misfortunes that strike us deep within. In the end, it’s about buried emotions that we ourselves create, and about exorcising my own resentment in the face of this situation.”

Text from the Samuel Fosso website / more images from the series can be found on the website

Samuel Fosso (Nigerian born Cameroon, b. 1962)
SIXSIXSIX
2020
Polaroid

Fosso’s series, SixSixSix (2015) – presented at the National Portrait Gallery in 2017 – is the subject of a second new Steidl book due later this year. Over three weeks in a Parisian studio, Fosso posed shirtless, sitting on a chair, two or three times a day in front of a crimson backdrop, staring at the camera. This culminated in 666 unique Polaroid images that capture Fosso’s varying emotional states, from glum, sad, angry to happy. The classical framing of each self-portrait depicting Fosso’s face and shoulders, his body almost merging into the background, is identical. What differs is the emanating mood and facial expression, no two images being exactly the same.

The title of the series referring to the evil connotation of the figure 666 in the Bible, the work was made partly in response to the Central African Republic’s civil war from 2012-2014. “My house, studio and photography accessories were completely destroyed,” laments Fosso, who eventually managed to escape the violence and catch a flight to France as he had a French passport. Although his archive has been preserved by Patras and the negatives of his series are with Griffin Editions in New York, Fosso lost some of his early colour photographs when his studio was set alight. “Unhappiness has often struck my path – illness and war in my childhood, then wars and wars,” Fosso says.

Anna Sansom. “Me, Myself & I,” on the 1854 photography website 3 May 2020 [Online] Cited 23/10/2022