With work that sits at a cross section of photography and performance, Samuel Fosso’s portraits unfix identity to question the social and political, the personal and the historical. Hear him now in conversation as we mark his nomination in the final in our series of talks with this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize finalists.
Moderated by Yasufumi Nakamori (Senior Curator of International Art, Photography, at Tate Modern).
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Biographies
Samuel Fosso (b. 1962, Kumba, Cameroon) has been described as a ‘man of a thousand faces.’ The photographer was only 13 when he established a commercial studio in Bangui, Central African Republic. His early experiments with performance and the transformative potential of self-portraiture (70s Lifestyle series) were a significant development in the long tradition of studio photography in Africa. For the African Spirits series, Fosso re-staged austere portraits of such leading figures as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis and Haile Selassie. It marked his desire to inscribe key figures from the history of black resistance onto museum walls. Fosso unfixes identity by turning the camera on himself, reinventing and reimagining key historical figures and social archetypes. He embodies a powerful way of existing in the world, and a vivid demonstration of photography’s role in the construction of myths.
Yasufumi Nakamori is the Senior Curator of International Art (Photography) at Tate Modern. He leads Tate’s photography strategy and has curated various displays and the exhibition Zanele Muholi. He is the author of For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography, 1968 – 1979 and Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture among other significant books on Japanese art and architecture. Previously Dr. Nakamori was the Head of Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. He holds a PhD in History of Art and Visual Studies from Cornell University.
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