There are many abiding spirits, historical and cultural, hovering over the work on display on the fourth floor of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, where Samuel Fosso and Arthur Jafa are in competition for this year’s Deutsche Börse prize. As you enter the gallery, the stern faces of Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie and Angela Davis stare down from the opposite wall, instantly recognisable but unsettlingly unreal. Next door, Robert Johnson and Miles Davis gaze directly at the viewer, cigarettes dangling from their lips, the latter in particular seeming to channel the ghost of the mythical “bad man”, Stagger Lee, from behind his outsize shades.
Black history and identity loom large in the work of both artists, but also the historical and contemporary function of the photographic image in creating, and distorting, that history and identity. African Spirits, Fosso’s series of performative self-portraits of iconic black figures, have such a powerful presence that they seem to be watching you from across the years as you peruse his other work. The diptych on an adjoining wall in which Fosso pays homage to the many west African soldiers who fought in both world wars is poignant as well as historically and formally complex. It carries a less immediately dramatic, but no less resonant, charge.
