FACING THE SELF

Autoportrait by Samuel Fosso
Co-published by the Walther Collection and Steidl
July 2020Selected by Claire de Rouen

It amazes me that this book wasn’t published years ago. Fosso began making self-portraits in 1975, when he set up a commercial studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, aged just 13. He took the pictures, which he intended to share with his family, at night when the studio was closed and worked on all aspects of the final image – the set, his clothes, pose and expression. Over the decades this activity expanded into a complex art practice that addresses identity, politics, artifice, emotion and visual rhetoric. When I spoke to him on the occasion of his retrospective at the MEP in Paris, last year, he said: “This is about the re-education of the next generation.” – Lucy Kumara Moore