Samuel Fosso: African Spirits

African Spirits features the artist’s fourteen self-portraits. In this series, completed in 2008, Fosso pictures himself as Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Malcolm X, and other prominent figures from 20th-century Black liberation movements. His photographs reference iconic images, such as Carl Fischer’s photograph of Muhammad Ali that was published on the cover of Esquire in 1968 and the police mugshot taken of King after his arrest during the 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. Fosso’s reinterpretations of these historic photographs pay homage to the figures in the original images and raise questions about individuality, celebrity, the media, and the complicated history of representation.

 Out of print.

Title: African Spirits
Publisher/Printer: Sébastien Girard, 2022
Photographer: Samuel Fosso
Format: Sewn, risograph printed
Size:  33 x 42 cm, 30 pages 
ISBN: 9782953451689
Edition: 400 copies