Here's Looking At Me: The Many Faces Of Samuel Fosso

Central African Republic Mon 15-02-2010

Here's Looking At Me: The Many Faces Of Samuel Fosso
By Jessica Taylor / The Guardian.co.uk

The residents of the Quartier Mustapha assume the prizes are for the portraits he takes of locals in his Studio Photo National, and that his trips to Europe are in order to take wedding photos.

The Many Faces Of Samuel Fosso

In fact, he has become a cult figure in Europe and the US because of his remarkable self-portraits.

Inside Fosso's studio, the walls are plastered with portraits of family groups, young lovers, grinning children, proud teenagers.

He flicks on his studio lights, which are made from tin cooking pots, takes a seat in the centre of the room and stares straight ahead, as if into a camera lens. He is strikingly beautiful, with perfectly symmetrical features.

Fosso, 44, loves the way he looks. It was for his old age that he took so many self-portraits, he says - so that he and his children could remember how fantastically attractive he once was. And he always knew he was going to be famous.

Vanity aside, Fosso's story is a complex one. He is originally an Ibo from eastern Nigeria. He was only six years old and being brought up by his grandparents when the Biafran war broke out in 1967.

The family went on the run for two years after seeing their village burned down. They returned to their village after the ceasefire - but to a miserable existence.

When Fosso's brother arrived from CAR promising him a new life in Bangui, he jumped at the chance of getting away from war-torn Nigeria.

Rather than follow his brother into his furniture-making business, Fosso chose to pursue a career as a studio passport photographer.

First as an apprentice and then as owner of his own studio, he has been taking photographs of CAR's citizens for 30 years. But these are no ordinary passport shots: he lends them clothes and puts up exotic backgrounds.

He soon saw what his portraits did for his clients' confidence. "The way I take photographs and the way that I use backdrops in order to pose people for their pictures is all about transporting them, taking them to places where they don't go," he says. "It's me who transports them through my photography. It's about taking somebody to a place that they aren't able to get to themselves."

Soon he saw that he could do this for himself too. He started to have clothes made for himself in the styles that he saw in the few magazines that filtered through to Bangui from the French colonisers.

And when he started to turn the camera on himself in the privacy of his studio, he really became that model or that rock star.

At first, his excuse was that he needed to take pictures of himself to send to his grandmother back in Nigeria so that she could see that he was growing up and that he was healthy.

But soon he was doing it for himself. "I always got a photo to her every year, so that she would know that I was alive, with a note saying, 'I'm fine, I'm growing up!' I started taking photos as a way of watching myself grow up, but this turned into art and, consequently, a history of myself."

As the years went by, the clothes became more outlandish and the poses more experimental. Fosso carried on like this for 20 years, neatly filing away the negatives, printing some but keeping them to himself.

It was only in 1994, when he was approached by Bernard Descamps, a French photographer organising an exhibition of African photography in Mali, that he dusted off what had become a substantial body of work. He won first prize at the exhibition.

Le Chef qui a vendu by Samuel Fosso

Le Chef qui a vendu l'Afrique aux colons| Samuel Fosso | c-print | 18.3 x 18.3 in. / 46.5 x 46.5 cm | 2005

At this point Fosso allows himself a little nostalgia. "I can assure you that the first time that I was in a newspaper in Mali in 1994, I said to myself, 'That's it. Everything I wanted to happen has happened, and even if it all ends here, that's enough.' "

In the wake of the exhibition, Fosso travelled to Paris, and profiles of him were written in the French press. He delighted readers by taking photographs of himself in front of the Arc de Triomphe.

His work formed part of exhibitions that travelled to London and New York, but all the time he kept returning to Bangui to take his passport photographs.

The next time he went to Europe was for a commission from a French chain of department stores. Newly armed with make-up artists, assistants, a costume budget and a state of the art studio, Fosso went to town.

He worked in colour as opposed to black and white, he dressed up as a woman, as a pimp, and as a transvestite; but the greatest acclaim was reserved for the picture of him as an African chief.

"With this photo, I wanted to say to westerners, 'Look, we had our own democracy before you came, we had our own rulers, our own presidents, but it was our ruler that you came and got rid of, and in his place, you set up your hierarchies, your systems.'

It's about the things they did in the past, and the things that they continue to do. On the surface they cover it up, but beneath the surface it's the same as ever."

It is this vitriol, so close to the surface, that makes Fosso so fascinating. He is angry about the way that his country - rich in oil, diamonds and gold - continues to be at the mercy of outside influences.

He couldn't be further from the popular image of the artist from a developing nation, amazed and grateful for having been "discovered".

"Would I ever leave Africa for Europe? No, absolutely not. Anyone who thinks that Africans who go and live in France in London, in Holland, in the US are accepted as equals is much mistaken.

People talk about the promised land in the States, but when I see African Americans I can see that they struggle more than the whites."

That is not to say, however, that he is naive about African politics and problems. Fosso was in Bangui for the army mutinies of 1996 and 1997, at the end of which almost every public building in the city had been torched and the large expat French community driven out.

Fosso witnessed the murder of his neighbour by looting soldiers, and explored the fear that he had felt in his next project, by posing nude in a series of photographs that explore his vulnerability.

It is interesting that the reaction in Europe and the States has been to wonder at the sexually provocative nature of these photographs. "I didn't do this to be like western artists, who like to pose naked for the sake of it. No, my idea was different: it was quite simply that I wanted to remember my friend, and the fear that I felt during his assassination."

This latest body of work has put him on the cusp of the big time. He travelled to New York for the first time for an opening of a major touring group exhibition entitled The Short Century.

Some leading galleries in New York are considering him for solo shows, and he is due to travel to Denmark to pick up an award, and to Syria for an exhibition.

Fosso talks about his work with striking simplicity. It may be this clarity that stops him from being too interested in the critics and the attention he now receives. "When I'm taking a self-portrait, I'm not looking to find out more about Samuel Fosso. I'm searching first of all to see my beauty. That's how I started.

"When I look at myself in the mirror, I am not looking to find out if what I see is an Ibo, a Central African or even a black American. The only thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait."

The Many Faces of Samuel Fosso, directed by Heidi Perry and Jessica Taylor, will be shown on BBC4 at 9pm on July 15.

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