It often takes a few moments to recognize Samuel Fosso in his self-portraits. He’s a picture of otherworldly piety as the first Black Pope, stepping on a space rock as though ready to catechize the cosmos. (It’s a cheeky allusion to Maurizio Cattelan’s controversial sculpture of a meteorite striking John Paul II.) Then, suddenly, he’s late-sixties Angela Davis, throwing dialectical side-eye from beneath her world-historical fro. The makeup and costumes are immaculate—in the first image, Fosso wears genuine vestments from the papacy’s official tailor—but the real force of his photos lies in their author’s remarkable absorption, as much a giveaway as his hypnotic stare and pronounced Cupid’s-bow lips. “When I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake,” he once said in an interview. “It’s not a subject or an object; it’s one more human being.”