Self-portrait and Self-identity in the Works of Samuel Fosso
by James Rodgers
In the catalogue for the exhibition Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography from 2006, Okwui Enwezor highlights the concept of “Afro-Pessimism”, the visual construction and consumption of “Africa” by the Western media (especially in news reporting) as either a space of precarious existence or beautiful landscape where people are entirely absent and reduced to a “veritable” unknown. It invalidates the historical usefulness of African experience based on the belief that nothing good happens in Africa and that Africans possess nothing of value to advance humanity. In this exhibition, Enwezor investigates the power of photography to construct narratives like this and calls for a counter-reporting that provides a different discourse from a new lens, and that “to transform the epistemology of Afro-pessimism is to dismantle an entire intellectual edifice and with it a seemingly incorrigible world view. Ethically, placing the quest for truth above newsworthiness is essential.” The portraits of Samuel Fosso overall contribute to this project in a unique ways. Fosso pushes the boundary of his personal identity, and, more broadly, western perceptions in order to reclaim marginalized subjectivities from the expectations of the Western gaze. Through performance and intentional projection in his self-portraits, Fosso investigates the legacy of colonialism and globalization through themes of memory and family.
Figure 1. Samuel Fosso, The Chief: He Who Sold Africa to the Colonists, 1997. C-print photograph.
https://stevemiddlehurstcontextandnarrative.wordpress.com/2015/07/11/symbolism/
In the self-portrait The Chief: He Who Sold Africa to the Colonists, Samuel Fosso uses his physical body and identity to conceptualize the theme of “selling Africa”, both through the visual consumption and construction of Africa and through historical caricatures of authoritative figures who literally sold people and resources for personal gain (Figure 1). He places himself in the center of a rich, vibrant room with a background of multi-patterned fabrics reminiscent of earlier African studio portraiture such as Seydou Keita. His body is distinctly outlined from the background fabric and he is sitting on a leopard skin throne. Theresa Sims writes that as part of a series commissioned by the French department store Magasins Tati and at the beginning of the recognition of his work as “African photography” in an international context, the photograph satirizes the idea of Africa as a commodity for consumption and his own role in the international art market in selling his photographs as visual representations of Africa.
One way to help elucidate portraits like this is to consider how Christian Metz sees photographs as offering indexical and iconic signs. Whereas the index is a “process of signification in which the signifier is bound to the referent not by social convention, not by similarity, but by actual connection in the world” where the image is grounded in a specific space and time, the icon is “an image, representation, symbol, someone or something famous, or something otherwise with larger than life status. Icons are often perceived to represent universal concepts, emotions and meanings”. Using this as a springboard,He Who Sold Africa can be considered more “iconic” than “indexical” in that it utilizes a lot of tactile, symbolic material the relates to multiple cultural and historical spheres related to this idea of African leaders “selling” to the Europeans. In fashioning himself as an authoritative African figure he makes vague allusions to royal body adornment; heaps gold necklaces imitating the jewlery worn by Asante kings in Ghana; and adorns coral beads evoking Benin monarchs in Nigeria. In reference to the way these leaders have sold resources to Europeans and participated in the slave trade he adorns a silver bracelet on the right arm (manilla) that served as currency for European slave trader in West Africa until the nineteenth century, among other signifiers. In addition to these historical and cultural icons, Fosso references more recent African rulers “who drew upon precolonial sartorial vocabularies to legitimate their own images as postcolonial leaders” such as the leopard skin recalling Mobutu Sese Seko. This image also mockingly imitates western variations on the motif of the African king as an exotic figure, such as in the bookAfrican Ceremonieswhich depicts Asante royalty in Ghana; Fosso imitates the way the royal body is dissolved into a rich field of material, but used in an ironic way rather than for an exoticized purpose that creates distance between the west and the “other”. However, by imitating the very stereotypical tropes of“Africanness” that he is critiquing in a photo that was intended to be widely distributed and consumed, Fosso questions “the extent to which Fosso’s own role as an African artist in the world of global contemporary art is to ‘sell Africa’ in a context that so often demands this of artists from outside the West”. In this way Fosso effectively melded together historical, cultural, and personal signifiers and sartorially assumed a new identity – that of the stereotypical image of African kings – and thus pushes the boundary of his identity in a way that subverts western expectations of him.
Figure 2. Samuel Fosso, Self-portrait, 1976. 1976.
https://www.guernicamag.com/the-self-portraits-of-samuel-fosso/
Some of his earliest self-portraits from the mid-1970s, however, also demonstrate an outwardly transgressive nature in altering or augmenting his identity and gender, such as Self-portrait, 1976, where he assumes the character of a sailor (Figure 2). These works were made on the end of his film rolls after closing up his photography studio, Studio National, in Bangui. Fosso said of his work that “I don’t put myself in the photograph […] my work is based on specific situations and people I am familiar with, things I desire, rework in my imagination and afterwards interpret. I borrow an identity”. These early works are a search for his identity among many, and were made for personal, intimate consumption rather than to be sold – Fosso notes that the body was seen as sacred and not to be exhibited, thus highlighting the fun and transgressive nature of these early images. This laid the groundwork for his later images that were directly performative and involved political commentary (such as He Who Sold Africa) using these strategies of cross-gendered identity. Enwezor writes that Fosso’s work was informed by the history of studio photography in West Africa as well as being one of the earliest examples “of a considered commentary on contemporary African masculinity, gender, identity and sexuality, all of which come off rather as ambiguous in his androgynous depictions”. These early portraits are also significant in that they reflect the youthful pan-African styles of the time and the desire to break free from political and aesthetic restrictions.
Figure 3. Samuel Fosso, from the series Le Reve de mon Grand-Père, 2003.
These ideas also apply to portraits that involve his personal history, such as the series Le Réve de Mon Grand-Père from 2003, in which he pays homage to his grandfather who was a healer in Biafra (Figure 3). Ingrid Holzl in discussing the performativity of Fosso’s photographs refers to what she calls the “autoportraitistic pact”, in which she writes that the photographic self-portrait is a performative sign, not a representation but an act. She writes that:
“This pact made between the author and the beholder requires the physical presence of the author neither in front of the camera nor behind the camera. Since the self-portrait is the result of a self-referential speech act, every image that affects the self-portraitist can become his self-portrait, including images that he hasn’t made himself. The self-portrait, in this extended meaning, is not a matter of resemblance but of performativity, relying on the author’s fidelity as well as the beholder’s trust”.
In other words, while Fosso uses his own body as a model for self-portraits in a self-referential way in his early portraits, his later self-portraits after he becomes internationally recognized are referential towards fictitious characters. Fosso has said that “when I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake […] I consider my body as a human being, but always belonging to other subjects, to the person who I am in the process of reproducing”. Thus, in this self-portrait of a different identity Fosso channels aspects of his grandfather into a fictitious character that is nonetheless rooted in reality. Holzl writes that this homage was a “self-vision”, a realization of his grandfather’s dream that he would become a healer (but instead becoming a photographer) in an image that does not reflect actual life but a virtual self. Marianne Hirsch, theorizing on the politics of the familial gaze in family and self-portraits, writes that the construction of the self-portrait is necessarily relational and familial, and that “just as the family picture can be read as a self-portrait, so the self-portrait always includes the other, not only because the self, never coincident, is necessarily other to itself, but also because it is constituted by multiple and heteronomous relations”. Inasmuch as his performative and queer early self-portraits informed work that critiqued the global art market and the western gaze, they also helped consider the role of his personal and intimate family history in his work.
By pushing past his own identity to create new characters and subjectivities with his own body and historical and geographical specificity, Samuel Fosso comments and critiques the nature of his position in the postcolonial world and the global art market.
Biography:
Chatap, Yves and Fosso, Samuel. “The Lives of Samuel Fosso: A Conversation with Yves Chatap.” Aperture 227 (2017): 38-45.
Dumochelle, Kevin. “Beyond the Body Boundary: Queer(y)ing the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode” in Expressions of the Body: Representations in African Text and Image, edited by Charlotte Baker, 63-93. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009.
Enwezor, Okui. “Popular Theatre, Photography and Difference.” In Samuel Fosso, edited by Maria Francesca Bonetti. Milan: 5 Continents, 2004: 14-19
Enwezor, Okui. Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography. New York: Stiedl, 2006.
Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Holzl, Ingrid. “Self-Portrait/Self-Vision: The Work of Samuel Fosso.” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 24 (2009): 40-47.
Salley, Raél Jero. “The Face I Love: Zanele Muholi’s ‘Faces and Phases’.” In Queer African Reader, edited by Sokari Ekine and Hakima Abbas, 107-118. Dakar: Pambazuka Press, 2013.
Sims, Theresa. “Selling Africa: Samuel Fosso’s The Chief: He Who Sold Africa to the Colonists.” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 44 (2019): 52-63.