From the New York Times T Men's Fashion Spring 2009:
Samuel Fosso, Man of a Thousand Faces
by Leslie Camhi
Fosso satirized the corruption of Africa’s leaders in a color picture he created in 1997, when the Parisian department store Tati invited him to set up a photography studio (with, for the first time, a budget for makeup and costumes) in Barbès, a neighborhood popular with African immigrants. ‘‘People think it’s Mobutu,’’ he said of a comically surreal image that shows the seated artist, draped in gold jewelry and leopard skins and holding sunflowers, a symbol of traditional African medicine. (In other pictures from that series, he appears as a Japanese sailor and a ‘‘liberated’’ African-American woman.) ‘‘In fact,’’ he explained, ‘‘it’s a photograph that represents all those African chiefs who sold their continent to the whites.’’
See the whole article here.
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