Samuel Fosso, "La femme américaine libérée des anées 70" .
"In every photograph the beautiful Fosso is subject, object and creator. Occasionally he includes other people, but their posture and placement relegates them to a secondary position. In one stagy, understated and slightly bizarre image, for example, Fosso, in large sunglasses autographs a book for an anonymous man, who inclines deferentially towards him. In other photographs, like an indifferent, latter-day and urbanised Narcissus, he’s pictured sitting or standing with himself through the magic of a double exposure. The shallow depth of the studio is transformed with flowers, cane furniture and patterned cloth into a parody of a genteel boudoir. Unlike Narcissus, however, it’s impossible to separate the reflected Fosso from the original - like a happily married couple, one ‘self’ co-habits comfortably with the other. It’s interesting to compare these double images with 19th- and early 20th-century ‘before-and-after conversion’ double-portrait photographs distributed by European missionaries as proof of their ‘civilising’ influence on various African colonies. Fosso’s playful fragmentation of the self-portrait creates a clever counterpoint to the continent’s history of photographic colonialism, a form of aesthetic Euro-centrism, which reduced indigenous cultural and social complexities to convenient one-liners. "
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