Thought For The Day
Samuel Fosso

Samuel Fosso is an African photographer born in Cameroon in 1962, who now lives in Bangui. In the late '70s a local portrait photographer gave him a camera and Fosso began constructing sets and photographing himself in them. I discovered his brilliant pictures at the African photography exhibition currently on at the Barbican alongside the Picasso show. He reminds me a lot of a one-man Pierre et Gilles. In fact, he reminds me of me being Momus, wrestling singlehandedly with my technology in order to create a new identity for myself, a beautiful new illusion.

In his '70s images (first published in the Revue Noire, Paris) Fosso is greyhound slim and his clothes immaculate. There's something supercamp about his narcissistic self-portraits, but also something serious and cool, as though, with a bit of bricolage and some camera lights, he could build himself a finer world.

This review of an exhibition of Fosso's photographs comes from Frieze magazine:



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