You could spend all day in “African Spirits” at Yossi Milo Gallery, a sensational roundup of West African portrait photography from its golden age in the pre-independence 1950s to the present.

Malick Sidibé , the storied chronicler of Malian night life, reaches deep into the nuances of black and white with striped backdrops; the French-Senegalese portraitist Delphine Diallo takes bold color to its limits in a shot of a man with green hair posing in a hot pink bathrobe; and Samuel Fosso , who was born in Cameroon and started working as a photographer in the Central African Republic, shot himself in fabulous sunglasses, as well as in his underwear, as a teenager in the 1970s. Through all the work runs a powerful attention to presence — the camera’s as well as the subject’s — and a keen awareness that a person’s identity really only begins when it’s performed for someone else.

But I suggest going straight to a triptych of snapshots found in Benin and made, apparently, by a studio called Roka in the 1960s. In each, a young man drapes himself across a bicycle, or bicycles, in what looks like a cross between conceptual art and modern dance. Part of their appeal is certainly the mystery. But mainly it’s formal: Whatever their intention, they succeed in transforming bicycles and man alike into vivid, disconcerting sculpture. WILL HEINRICH