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Sa m u e l Fosso, f r om t h e series Tati, "Th e Liberat ed Am er i can Wo m a n f r om t h e 1 9 7 0 s,"© 2 0 0 8 Sam u ei Fosso, court esy Jean Mar c Patras Galerie, Paris. 40* N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art SELF- PORTRAIT/ SELF- VISION THE WORK OF SAMUEL FOSSO Ingrid Hdlzl T his essay takes the work of Samuel Fosso as the starting point of my reflections—not in an attempt to reveal the genuine features of African self-portraiture but to examine a work that is exclusively self-photographic with regard to subject theory and the logics of representation that are at work in a self-photographic setting (situation). So what kind of role does this setting play in terms of self-referentiality? According to index theory, the essence of photography and thus the meaning of a photograph is its reference to the photographed object. In the case of the selfportrait this object is the photographer himself. The prototypical self-portrait is thus made with the aid of a delayed-action shutter release that allows the photographer to pass in front of the H ip p o lyt e Ba ya r d , Self- Portrait as a Drowned Man, 1840. , , , , , . r , ,, Direct Positive Print, 21 x 24.7 cm . l e n s a n d t o become the object of the image as well as its subject matter. This doubling of the photographer being at the same time behind and in front of the camera does not hold anything magic, but is the effect of a technical invention that dates back to the early years of photography. The first self-portraits in the history of photography, the three Self-portraits as a Drowned Man by Hippolyte Bayard, were taken in Sa m u e l Fosso, f rom t he series Tati, "Th e Bour geoise (II),"© 2 0 0 8 Sam u el Fosso, court esy Jean Mar c Patras Galerie, Paris. 4 2 - N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art 1840. These "impossible" images not only inaugurate one of photography's most prolific genres, but also (as a subgenre) the costume self-portrait, which in postmodern photography, steeped in poststructuralist critique of representation, takes on a particular meaning. The delayed-action shutter release allows the photographer to split up the two moments, which, following Dubois,1 fold into one single photographic act: the moment of pressing the release button and the moment of the actual shutter release.2 Normally, the photographer has ten seconds to change his position, becoming the photographed object while remaining the author of the image. The self-portrait is the photographic trace of this personal union between the photographer and the photographed. Contrary to the ordinary photograph, a self-portrait is defined from both sides of the camera: the side of the photographer (it's me who made the image) and the side of the photographed (it's me who has been photographed , to whom the image refers to). It is evident, however, that since the very early days of photography, but particularly in contemporary photography, artists have developed strategies to contest this prototype of self-portraiture that presupposes the personal identity of the photographer and the photographed and subsequently identifies every self-photography with self-portraiture . Samuel Fosso examines exactly this identification in his series Tati (1997). The photographic image cannot be defined by index theory alone, which merely takes into account the relation between object and camera and thus reduces the photographic sign to an optichemical or rather electronic trace of the object: to its index. Photography, however, like language, is a symbolic sign whose point of departure is neither the photographed object nor the photographic device, but the author behind the camera. Only if every photograph is a symbolic sign, the photographic self-portrait is a performative sign, thus not a representation but an act. Selfportraiture , says Derrida in Memoirs of the Blind, is the act of claiming of an image to be one's selfportrait (definition necessarily tautological).3 Usually, this is done by...

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