Samuel Fosso
Self-Portrait (as Liberated American Woman of the '70s)

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Artist Samuel FossoCameroonian, born 1962

CultureCameroonian

Titles

Self-Portrait (as Liberated American Woman of the '70s)
La Femme américaine libérée des années 70

Date1997, printed 2003

PlaceCameroon, Africa

MediumChromogenic print

DimensionsImage: 34 3/16 × 33 15/16 in. (86.9 × 86.2 cm)
Sheet: 41 1/2 × 40 in. (105.4 × 101.6 cm)
Frame: 45 × 45 × 1 1/2 in. (114.3 × 114.3 × 3.8 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Nina and Michael Zilkha

Object number2004.809

Not on view

Explore Further

Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionSamuel Fosso began
making self portraits to send as evidence of his wellbeing to his grandmother
in Nigeria, who he left behind when he fled Nigeria in 1972. He opened his
first photography studio in Cameroon at the age of 13, after an apprenticeship
with a Nigerian photographer who was one of two studio owners in the country.

Fosso controls every aspect of each portrait,
including costumes, props, background, and poses. ‘‘Taking pictures is for me a
way of liberating myself from the sufferings of childhood, from illness, war,
everything. I always believed that my life would be pushed aside by other
people’s. But photography has given me a second life. It’s made all lives
possible for me.”

Fosso is also fascinated with fashion and the
ways it can be used to temporarily transform identity. The image here
is from the Tati series, a body of
work he made when the Parisian department store of the same name invited him to
set up a studio in Paris, using costumes and make up from the store.

Provenance[Jack Shainman Gallery, New York]; purchased by MFAH, 2004.
Exhibition History"Tapping Currents: Contemporary African Art and the Diaspora," The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, November 17,2007–April 13, 2008.

"Ruptures and Continuities: Photography Made after 1960 from the MFAH Collection," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, February 21–May 9, 2010.

"Afro-Atlantic Histories," Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 24, 2021–January 17, 2022; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., April 10–July 17, 2022. (OL.1505)

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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