Yossi Milo Gallery is presenting Samuel Fosso's debut solo exhibition, featuring the renowned Cameroonian-Nigerian photographer's innovative approach to self-portraiture and African studio photography. The exhibition comes ahead of Fosso's inclusion in "Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and the Political Imagination," a comprehensive survey of African studio photography opening at the Museum of Modern Art on December 14, 2025, curated by Oluremi Onabanjo.
Born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon, Samuel Fosso has spent decades using self-portraiture to reinvent the traditional practices of West African studio photography. His work first gained international recognition in 1994 when he won First Prize at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali, launching his career on the global stage. Through his artistic practice, Fosso addresses fundamental questions about identity and representation in post-colonial Africa.
Fosso's photography serves as a powerful tool for exploring how self-representation can reclaim African identity from colonial imagery and resist cultural erasure. His work examines the intersection between personal and collective history, using the camera as what collector and author Artur Walther describes as a vehicle for "mythmaking potential." In his 2020 monograph "AUTOPORTRAIT," Walther notes that Fosso "amplifies himself and yet becomes someone else entirely" through his transformative self-portraits.
The artist's journey began with his earliest series, "70s Lifestyle" (1975-78), created when he was just a teenager working at Photo Studio Nationale in Bangui, Central African Republic. Fosso opened this photography business at age thirteen, three years after fleeing Nigeria's civil war. Initially, he would use the last few frames of film rolls to photograph himself, sending these images to his grandmother in Nigeria after busy days taking customer portraits and passport photos.
What started as personal correspondence gradually evolved into a sophisticated artistic practice. In an interview with the late Okwui Enwezor, curator of the 56th Venice Biennale, Fosso revealed his early creative process: "Sometimes when I made photographs I was not satisfied with, where I didn't feel beautiful inside, I would cut up the negatives instead of printing them. I did not know I was making art photography. What I did know is I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become."
Fosso's motivation for photography stems from his own experience of exclusion and erasure. As a child who was partially paralyzed and disabled, he was not photographed until age ten. This early absence from visual records would later inform his understanding of representation's social value and drive his commitment to entering himself into the photographic archive with full agency and control over his image.
The exhibition "Samuel Fosso" runs from September 3 through November 8, 2025, at Yossi Milo Gallery, located at 245 Tenth Avenue in New York. The show provides an opportunity to experience Fosso's transformative work before his major institutional presentation at MoMA later in the year.
