Samuel Fosso, published by 5 Continents Editions in December 2004, is the catalogue of exhibitions held in Rome and Verona that year. It brings together roughly 120 works made between 1975 and 2003, offering a sustained view of an artist who has made the photographic self a site of invention rather than simple self-description. Staged self-portraits, changes of costume and deliberate acts of photographic performance place identity at the centre of the book’s concerns.

The significance of this selection lies in its range across Fosso’s practice. The self appears here not as a fixed subject but as a constructed role: it can be playful, theatrical, stylised or unsettled. By repeatedly placing his own body before the camera, Fosso examines how appearance is shaped by costume, pose and the conventions of portraiture. The work therefore rewards attention to sequence and variation, allowing recurring gestures and transformations to become part of the reading.

Edited by Maria Francesca Bonetti and G. Schlinkert, the exhibition catalogue brings these changing forms of self-presentation together within a historical survey of Fosso’s photography. Its value for a serious collector rests in the breadth of the survey and in the way it records an important period of Fosso’s image-making, from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. The Italian/English edition is a substantial 192-page hardcover measuring 24 × 28 cm, a format suited to following the visual distinctions among the works while retaining the continuity of the larger body of work.