The Nigerian, Cameroon-born photographer, Samuel Fossofamous for portraits in environments rich with striking patterns, as well as self-portraits in which he presents himself as Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Angela Davis won the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2023.

The award is given in recognition of the “Fosso” retrospective at the European House of Photography in Paris (Maison Européenne de la Photographie), which highlighted a career spanning nearly 50 years and comes with a cash prize of $38,000.

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Shoair Mavlian, director of the Photographers’ Gallery and chairman of the Deutsche Börse jury, praised Fosso’s work noting that he created a “great platform for black voices and artists throughout his career».

Raised in Nigeria, Foso fled the Biafra war as a youth and in 1972 an uncle took him with him to the Central African Republic. In 1975, aged just 13, he opened Studio Photo Nationale for commercial portrait photography.

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“I started taking self-portraits just to use up the spare film, people wanted their pictures the next day even if the roll wasn’t finished, and I didn’t like the waste. The idea was to send some photos to my mother in Nigeria, to show her that I am okay“, he had previously said in an interview with the “Guardian”.

In 1994, an exhibition of African photography was organized in Mali. With some of my self-portraits I won first prize. Now my works are presented in Paris, New York, London, said the photographer, who is also known as “the man with 1,000 faces”.

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The Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Award awarded annually to a living artist of any nationality who has made a significant contribution, either through exhibition or publication, to the medium of photography in Europe in the previous year.