In Focus: 5 Photography Shows to See in New York

 

 

At 13, the Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso began making self-portraits that became his first series, 70s Lifestyle (1975–78). From the start he was on the outside looking in, inventing and borrowing personas, using the camera to transform himself. “I did not know I was making art photography,” he later said. “What I did know is I was transforming myself into what I wanted to become.”

 

This is Fosso’s year to conquer New York. In the spring, his photographs were unveiled in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly renovated Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, which encompasses work from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, redesigned by Kulapat Yantrasast; in December, he will be part of MoMA’s survey “Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination,” curated by Oluremi Onabanjo.

 

At Yossi Milo—Fosso’s first New York solo show in more than two decades—the exhibition spans over 30 years of work and centers on two complementary series. 70s Lifestyle captures the teenage Fosso experimenting with self-presentation in playful, stylish portraits. African Spirits (2008) shifts the frame to history, with the artist embodying Black historical figures such as Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

 

Fosso’s practice was born of absence. Disabled and displaced as a child, he was not photographed until the age of ten. That early erasure defined his insistence on representation, using self-portraiture as a way to claim visibility for himself and for broader Black histories.