Samuel Fosso Nigerian born Cameroon, b. In the evening, his commercial work complete, he would finish off a Kodak roll by taking staged self-portraits.
Can you imagine being a precocious 13 year-old, running your own commercial studio, and then at the end of the day creating sets and costumes and taking on roles to reflect his interest in African and Black American style. As a young man he is finding his own identity through pose and play.
Whom am I, who can I be in this life? His goal was to take a new direction in his work and capture a different mood from the images associated with African photography. This is where it takes the courage of your own convictions, an inherent sense of your creativity as an artist, and respect for yourself as a human being β¦ to strike out and do something different from everyone else, to recognise the chance of taking a different path, to use your imagination to create something fresh and new.
Fosso understood this was a crossroads in his life. Fosso was on his way. By placing himself at the centre of the theatre of postcolonial identity, and at the centre of sometimes tragic human dramas, the artist acts it being theatre , and performs as a prosopopoeia Greek which is a rhetorical device one which conveys a meaning with the goal of persuading the viewer towards considering a topic from a perspective , in which the artist communicates to the audience by speaking as another person.
Prosopopoeiae are used mostly to give another perspective on the action being described. Fosso is both himself and the Black Pope; Fosso is himself and he is also the Chairman. What if there was a Black Pope? What if the Chinese bankroll the finances of African governments and then make them subservient to the will of the Chinese government? How are the privileges of colonial occupation and disenfranchisement being played out on Black bodies and Black cultures even to this day?
