Yossi Milo Gallery is presenting the first solo exhibition of Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer Samuel Fosso at the gallery. The exhibition precedes the artist's participation in "Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and the Political Imagination," an upcoming show on African studio photography at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Oluremi Onabanjo and set to open on December 14, 2025.
Throughout his decades-long career, Samuel Fosso, born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon, has used self-portraiture to revisit historical traditions of studio photography from West Africa and beyond. Since his work gained international recognition when he won the First Prize at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali, in 1994, the artist has used his practice as a vehicle for addressing central questions of identity: How can self-representation reclaim African identity in the face of colonial imagery? How does Fosso's personal history reflect collective history? And most importantly, how does photography contribute to resisting erasure?
Collector and author Artur Walther writes in his preface to "AUTOPORTRAIT," a 2020 monograph dedicated to the artist: "From his experimental self-portraits, made as a teenager in the 1970s in a commercial studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, [Fosso] has never stopped exploring the mythic potential of the camera. In his self-portraits, he amplifies himself while becoming someone else." Throughout his entire body of work, beginning with his first series, "70s Lifestyle" (1975-1978), Fosso intuitively lifts the veil, breaking down subject and subjectivity by representing himself—the photographer.
"70s Lifestyle" was created in 1975 at Photo Studio Nationale, the photography business that the artist opened at just thirteen years old, three years after fleeing the Nigerian Civil War to Bangui, Central African Republic. After spending hours taking portrait and passport photos for his clients, Fosso would photograph himself with the last frames of film that he would then send to his grandmother in Nigeria. Over time, this practice took on the whims of artistic endeavor.
In an interview with the late Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 56th Venice Biennale, Fosso confided: "Sometimes, when I made photographs that I wasn't satisfied with, when I didn't feel beautiful inside, I would cut up the negatives instead of printing them... I didn't know I was making artistic photography. What I knew was that I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become."
Fosso's early interest in photography was motivated by his own exclusion from photographic archives: as a child, Fosso, who was partially paralyzed, disabled, and displaced, was not photographed until he was ten years old. This erasure would ultimately reveal the social value of representation for the artist, and self-portraiture would show him how to inscribe himself in an album with a certain agency.
The exhibition "Samuel Fosso" runs from September 3 through November 8, 2025, at Yossi Milo Gallery, located at 245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001. More information is available at www.yossimilo.com.
