“Everybody feels good-looking, but I know I’m good-looking.”
This sentence displayed on the wall of the Samuel Fosso exhibition at the Fondation Zinsou in Cotonou makes one smile. The first time one sees this Cameroonian photographer’s work, surprise is in order. For those already familiar with his unique approach, this exhibition revisits his career chronologically through fifteen photographs.
Fosso photographs himself in a variety of costumes and postures in his studio in Bangui in Central Africa. Sometimes he’s a woman, sometimes an icon, sometimes a hero. “The subject is me. But the subject is another person telling the story of another person.”
The layout of the exhibition plays with the periods and evolutions of the photographer’s work. The viewer is at first immersed in a world of black-and-white, where we see his first five photographs. He started out as a studio photographer in the traditional sense, and the final image in this series is his first self-portrait.
Up a flight of stairs, color leaps out at the viewer with ten photographs from the series Tati shot on commission for the 50th anniversary of the famous French department store. We immerse ourselves in these offbeat photos which make and break the codes of fashion and the representation of African identity. We’re faced with a pirate, an executive, a sailor and a middle class woman.
Since then, the photographs of Samuel Fosso have gone beyond simple self-portraits to communicate political messages, as in his more recent series African Spirit (2008), which features black-and-white “portraits” of pan-Africanist thinkers and figures from the American civil right movement like Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Patrice Lumumba and Léopold Sédar Senghor.
EXHIBITION
Samuel Fosso
Until August 2014
Fondation Zinsou
01 BP 7053 Cotonou
Benin
http://www.fondationzinsou.org/FondationZinsou/Fondation_Zinsou_Accueil.html
