Samuel Fosso's Self Portrait series at Masculinities: Liberations through Photography

Samuel Fosso (b. 1962, Cameroon) opened his photographic studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, at the tender age of thirteen. During the day Fosso ran a commercial studio, photographing the residents of Bangui, while at night he created highly performative black-and-white self-portraits in which he adopted a series of male personas, alluding to the idea that gender is an artificial proposition. The pictures from that mid-70s period, some of which are on display here, show the teenage Fosso in a variety of guises: wearing high-waisted flared trousers and aviator shades; stripped to the waist with his back to the lens in front of a painted urban backdrop; or dressed up in platform boots and tasselled trousers. Picturing himself in flares and platform boots can also be read as an act of discrete political rebellion against the censorious rule of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the self-declared Emperor of Central Africa who had instituted a ban on tight-fitting clothes. Ultimately, these carefully staged portraits enabled Fosso to assert his own presence, as he says: ‘When you look at my work, it’s my body that is looking at me. It’s my way of seeing.’

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.