From our friends at Guernica, today we bring you a feature on the self-portraits of artist Samuel Fosso. Author Emmanuel Iduma notes, “The self-portraits are intimate for what they allow to be imagined… [T]hese representations of our favorite black heroes ask viewers to think about the use of public images, and how they become objects of worship, and of control.” This article was originally published on November 17, 2014, but you can still catch the exhibition, which runs at the Walther Collection in New York through January 17, 2015.

Samuel Fosso. The artist as Angela Davis from African Spirits, 2008. Courtesy of the Walther Collection and Jean Marc Patras/Galerie, © Samuel Fosso.

The self-portraits of Samuel Fosso, a Cameroonian artist, are currently being exhibited at the Walther Collection in New York. Fosso began photographing himself soon after he opened his business, Studio Photo Nationale, in 1975 in Bangui, Central African Republic, at the age of thirteen. By day, he took portraits, passport photos, and wedding photographs for paying customers. By night, he experimented with self-portraiture, examining visual identity through costume, impersonation, and performance.

Entitled Samuel Fosso, the exhibition’s unspoken premise seems to be that the artist is due for a mid-career retrospective. Established by German-American collector Artur Walther, the nonprofit Walther Collection has only been public since 2010. It opened its headquarters in Neu-Ulm, Germany, adding an outpost in New York’s Chelsea district a year later. Walther has focused primarily on collecting contemporary Asian and African photography and video art, particularly around the subject of stereotype and selfhood. This exhibition is the first in the U.S. to combine Fosso’s past and present work in one show, with self-portraits alongside his studio work.

Read the full article here.