Since opening his own photography business, the Studio Photo Nationale, in Bangui, Central African Republic at the age of thirteen, Samuel Fosso has focused on self-portraiture. Throughout his career, Fosso has transformed his body through performance, envisioning variations of identity in the postcolonial era. In the lineage of masters of the staged self-portrait—such as Pierre Molinier, Van Leo, Cindy Sherman, and Yasumasa Morimura—Fosso’s early experimental works from the 1970s created a visual vocabulary opposed to both the ethnographic visions of Africa and the commercial imperatives of studio portraiture. Moving beyond the physical confines of his Bangui studio, his personal photo essays of the 2000s are tinged with a melancholic tone. A black-and-white image from one such series, "Mémoire d’un ami" (2000), renders Fosso reclining near nude in a spartan bedroom. It restages a moment of fear for the artist, made in memory of a neighbor killed by the Central African armed militia.

Deploying his now iconic theatrical and uncanny characterizations, Fosso has embodied a range of characters—deployed to different ends and inciting effects. Intervening directly into France’s fraught military history, "ALLONZENFANS" (2013) evokes the century-long, under-examined efforts of West African soldiers who served alongside their colonial authorities through the course of the two World Wars. Embodying Chairman Mao in "Emperor of Africa" (2014), Fosso excavates the myth-making qualities of the political portrait, while gesturing to the troubled contemporary relationships between China and the African continent. Bringing a more playful edge to these strategies, his "Black Pope" (2017) portraits frankly and boldly ask the question: What might a pope born in Africa look like? How might he act when brought before the camera? Finally, shot against the same deep vermilion backdrop, a selection of 66 Polaroids from "SIXSIXSIX," Fosso’s monumental 2015 series of six hundred sixty-six self-portraits, offer a striking departure from Fosso’s earlier work. In its understated, stripped-back approach, "SIXSIXSIX" stages an unmediated relation, underscoring this artist’s unfailing, interminable dialogue with the camera and unparalleled photographic career.

Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait coincides with the release of a book on the photographer’s work, co-published by The Walther Collection and Steid.