African Spirits

Book

African Spirits

Photographs

Samuel Fosso

Date

2022

30 pages, sewn bound
XL size publication risograph printed
42 x 33 cm
Editorial concept, design and printing by Sébastien Girard.
isbn 978-2-9534516-8-9

edition of 400 copies   /  Sold out
Last copies available at  Dashwood books (NY), Printed Matter (NY), Menil collection (Houston)
Photographer’s gallery (UK), setanta books (UK),  Huis Marseille (NL), Museum der modern Salzburg (Austria), Luma Foundation (Arles)

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.