Samuel Fosso’s Black Pope enters the visual tradition of modern papal portraiture and changes its expected sitter. In the series, the photographer clothes himself in papal regalia and stages a Black man within an office more often pictured, in recent centuries, through European faces. The Princeton University Art Museum’s account of the series describes convincing papal robes that make the imagined occupant of the office appear institutionally legible. The garments give Fosso the visual grammar of authority while the person wearing them exposes the racial limits of what viewers have been taught to picture in that office.
In one photograph Fosso rests a foot on a space rock. The New Yorker identifies it as an allusion to Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture of a meteorite striking Pope John Paul II. The gesture moves the scene beyond a conventional institutional portrait. Earthly religious office meets an object that suggests the cosmos. The series was included in the Wereldmuseum’s 2018 Afrofuturism exhibition, where the museum framed it as a challenge to imagine a possible Black pope. The series stands within decades of self-portraits that cross costume, history, politics and performance. Black Pope is one especially pointed instance of Fosso’s larger method.
Fosso’s own website describes a practice of creating alternate identities from the 1970s onward. Its listed series include 70’s Lifestyle, Tati, African Spirits, Emperor of Africa and Black Pope. These are not all visions of the future in the same sense. Some reconstruct an earlier era, some inhabit public figures, and some construct imagined roles. Their continuity lies in the artist’s control over the portrait. He becomes character and director while making the viewer notice how every image of authority has itself been staged.
The camera after closing time
Fosso’s early self-portraiture began in the setting of a commercial photography studio. As a teenager in Bangui, Central African Republic, he made images of himself in the clothes and poses of the period. The youth in those photographs is testing appearance, sometimes with the exuberance of fashion, sometimes with a quieter attention to how one body can hold different moods. His personal experimentation took place alongside a business that made portraits for others. That combination helps explain a lifelong interest in the conventions that make a sitter legible to a camera.
The early series is important to Black Pope because it shows the method before the scale of its later political claims. A studio portrait can be made by shifting a jacket, angle or gaze. Such choices may seem small, but they determine the person a viewer thinks they have met. Fosso learned to inhabit those choices from both sides of the camera. He did not need to wait for an institution to invite him into a historical role. He could rehearse one himself, then keep the resulting image.
That early work also carries a tension between private play and public circulation. A self-portrait may begin as an experiment for the maker and later enter exhibitions where strangers interpret its era, gender codes and cultural references. The photographs can bear those readings without having been conceived as an illustration of them. The images establish a practice of refusing a single fixed appearance. Fosso had already discovered that a photographic identity could be made and remade.
The Princeton account of Affirmative Acts traces that practice across a later career in which the self-portrait becomes a vehicle for historical encounter. The same face returns in changing clothes, but recurrence does not collapse the characters into the artist’s autobiography. Each role asks for research, bodily control and a decision about what an existing image means when it is inhabited anew.
Borrowing a public face
In African Spirits, Fosso reworks portraits associated with figures from African independence movements and the wider Black struggle for civil rights. The Menil Collection’s presentation identifies leaders and cultural figures including Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr, Patrice Lumumba and Muhammad Ali among the identities he assumes. The project is not an attempt to convince us that Fosso actually is any of them. The visible act of impersonation is its point. A famous historical photograph is never merely a record of a person; it becomes an icon through repetition, interpretation and public need.
In one portrait, MoMA notes, the artist restages Angela Davis’s unmistakable Afro; in another he takes on Patrice Lumumba’s browline spectacles. The Menil Collection traces his image of Martin Luther King Jr to the police mugshot made after King’s arrest during the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott. These are not generic signs of importance. Hair, glasses and an arrest photograph belong to very different moments in the public making of a person. Fosso selects the visual detail by which each figure has been repeatedly remembered, then places his own face and body within it. The result makes an archive feel both familiar and newly constructed. The image of a leader or artist is a cultural object, not an unmediated encounter with the individual. Reperformance can pay tribute while also examining the conventions that turned one photograph into the face of an era. Fosso’s work does not replace the original person or their history. It asks what happens when a later Black artist takes responsibility for keeping the icon active and open to interpretation.
There is a risk in any such project. Reenactment can flatten different political lives into a gallery of celebrated names. Fosso’s recurring body counteracts that ease by making the act of translation visible. We are not looking at an untouched historical document. We are looking at an artist who has studied how images claim authority and then has chosen to inhabit that claim temporarily. The distance between original and reenactment stays in the frame.
The same distance helps us read Black Pope. Instead of restaging a named modern pontiff, he uses the language of official portraiture to imagine a different occupant of the office. The viewer recognizes the regalia before recognizing the difference. At that instant, the work shows how an institution can teach people what power looks like so effectively that a new face in the role may first appear as a disruption.
The office and the costume
The papal robes supply an extraordinary piece of the series’ visual argument. Garments designed for an office are a kind of visual protocol. They signal continuity across individual occupants, suggesting that the institution endures while a person comes and goes. Fosso borrows that protocol. The clothes tell the viewer what rank and tradition to expect; the portrait asks whether the racial assumptions attached to that expectation were ever necessary.
Fosso also makes the Catholic Church’s universal claims visually specific. A church may describe its mission as encompassing the world, yet its most visible office has had a remarkably constrained public image. Black Pope does not need to announce a reform programme. It places one excluded possibility inside the visual apparatus of the office and lets the contradiction surface. The photographic medium is suited to this task because official portraits can make a role feel natural. Fosso uses that same ease to make a different image feel suddenly available.
The space-rock prop expands the register again. Its reference to another artist’s papal image is also a reminder that this portrait is a constructed fiction rather than a document of an actual pontificate. The future implied by the series is therefore neither a simple prediction nor a fantasy of power without conditions. It asks a viewer to notice the boundary of imagination: if this image feels strange, which part of it is strange, the Black sitter or the institution that has not yet pictured him there?
Princeton’s exhibition writing asks viewers to imagine a Black man in the position. That is a curatorial interpretation grounded in the work’s conceit. Fosso’s own account, quoted by the African Artists’ Foundation, describes his process as borrowing an identity, entering a physical and mental state, and interpreting what he has researched. The agency of the artist is more complex than dress-up. He must determine how to stand, look and occupy a role whose visual language precedes him.
Not every transformation is the same
Fosso’s other series provide necessary limits to an Afrofuturist reading. Emperor of Africa engages the iconography of political power and China’s relation to Africa. Tati makes an array of social characters through dress and theatrical pose. SIXSIXSIX is different again: 666 Polaroid self-portraits made after the destruction of his Bangui studio during the Central African Republic’s conflict. Fosso described changing his body and expression for each image in an Aperture interview, while a Princeton account of the exhibition identifies the 2015 sequence of 666 photographs. The changes of expression and gesture become the work’s field of difference. Their different formal decisions give Fosso’s portraiture more range than a single movement can describe.
That breadth is part of Fosso’s significance. He is a photographer of possible identities, but possibility may be political, historical, comic, intimate or grieving. Sometimes the portrait asks who could hold power. At other times it asks how a person survives or how an archive can be inhabited. His practice has room for a future image without making every image a future image. The tension between these uses of portraiture makes his future image more arresting.
The artist’s own website calls his work a way to question accepted codes of representation and identity. That claim has a technical basis. Every self-portrait in a series requires a fresh relation among costume, pose, camera and surrounding objects. The device repeats, but the meaning changes. A white background can read as a neutral studio in one image and an official setting in another. A patterned garment can be a fashion choice, a sign of office or a character’s invented biography. Fosso works at the point where such details become social knowledge.
Krull’s portrait of Toussaint Ishimwe as a fashion superhero offers a different example of costume and image making opening a speculative role for a Black subject. That editorial is playful and collaborative, while Fosso’s Black Pope assumes the weight of a religious office. The useful connection is the viewer’s quick recognition that styling can assign a person a place in a story. In both, the image asks more of its subject than simply appearing before the lens.
Who is allowed to resemble power?
Black Pope can be seen as an answer to a question that institutions rarely ask themselves: who is absent from their visual future? Its efficacy comes partly from the fact that Fosso does not make the figure alien to the office. The vestments and manner belong to a familiar portrait tradition. The change is the man within it. The work makes exclusion visible precisely because most of the frame still looks institutionally legible.
At the same time, a Black pope is not a sufficient measure of a transformed church, just as one unusual portrait cannot change its structures. Fosso’s art does not make such a claim. It makes an image available for thought. It forces viewers to confront the gap between universal language and inherited representation. The photograph can be both an imaginative opening and a reminder that actual change requires more than a new picture.
There is another reason the series belongs in a conversation about Afrofuturism. It makes a counterfactual public image from the materials of the present. Nothing in the portrait requires a futuristic machine. The imagined change is in the distribution of authority. The speculative question is as plain as it is sharp: what if this office looked like this? That question can be asked in a single photograph because decades of portraits have taught viewers what they expect to see.
Fosso’s longer career deepens the question. The boy trying new poses after studio hours, the artist inhabiting icons of Black history, and the figure in papal white all use photography to make identity visible as something negotiated rather than simply captured. The stages are not a straight march toward Black Pope. They show the range of a method that can turn a camera on the present, the archive or an unrealized possibility.
The result is an Afrofuturist image that remains unmistakably Samuel Fosso’s. It is meticulous about costume, alert to the politics of looking and willing to use humour without forfeiting seriousness. A portrait of a Black pope may appear at first to show the future. More exactly, it shows how little the future had to change for such a portrait to become imaginable, and how much the present still has to change for it to become ordinary.