His star turn came in the early nineties, when a scout for Rencontres de Bamako, a newly established biennial of African photography, visited his studio. Fosso didn’t yet consider himself an artist, but the West had recently “discovered” the Malian photographers Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, prompting an international craze for mid-century African studio portraiture. Soon, Fosso was exhibiting in Paris and receiving encouragement from Henri Cartier-Bresson, but he quickly ran up against curators’ preference for his early…
