Yossi Milo presents Samuel Fosso’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition precedes the artist’s inclusion in Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and the Political Imagination, a survey of African studio photography at the Museum of Modern Art curated by Oluremi Onabanjo and opening on December 14, 2025.
Over his decades-long career, Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso (b. 1962; Kumba, Cameroon) has deployed self-portraiture to innovate on storied traditions of studio photography from West Africa and beyond. Since the debut of Fosso’s work on a global stage when he was awarded First Prize at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali in 1994, the artist has used his practice as a conduit for questions central to identity: How can self-representation reclaim African identity from colonial imagery? How is Fosso’s personal history reflected in collective history? And, critically, how does photography assist in resisting erasure? Collector and author Artur Walther writes in his foreword for AUTOPORTRAIT, a 2020 monograph of the artist’s work: “Since the days of his experimental self-portraits, made as a teenager in the 1970s in a commercial studio in Bangui, the Central African Republic, [Fosso] has constantly explored the mythmaking potential of the camera. In his self-portraits, he amplifies himself and yet becomes someone else entirely.”
Across all his work, and beginning with his earliest series 70s Lifestyle (1975-78), Fosso intuitively pulls back the curtain, collapsing subject and subjectivity by depicting himself, the photographer. 70s Lifestyle was incepted in 1975 at Photo Studio Nationale, the photography venture the artist opened at just thirteen, three years after fleeing from Nigeria’s civil war to Bangui, the Central African Republic. After hours busy with customers taking headshots, portraits, and passport photos, Fosso would photograph himself with the last few frames in a roll of film to send to his grandmother in Nigeria. Over time, the practice took on the capricious qualities of a true artist’s process. In an interview with the late Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 56th Venice Biennale, Fosso shared: “Sometimes when I made photographs I was not satisfied with, where I didn’t feel beautiful inside, I would cut up the negatives instead of printing them… I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know is I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become.” Fosso’s early interest in photography was driven by his own exclusion from photographic record: as a child, Fosso, partially paralyzed, disabled, and displaced, was not pictured until he was ten years old. Eventually, this erasure would spell out the social value of representation to the artist, and self-portraiture would show a way to enter himself into an archive with agency.
Samuel Fosso
September 3 – November 8, 2025
Yossi Milo Gallery
245 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
www.yossimilo.com
