Sidibe, Malick

▪ 2008

born 1935 or 1936, Soloba, French Sudan [now Mali]

      In 2007 Malick Sidibé became the first photographer and the first African to receive the Venice Biennale art exhibition's Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement. After underscoring the importance of photography as a creative medium in Africa, exhibition director Robert Storr said of Sidibé: “No African artist has done more to enhance photography's stature in the region, contribute to its history, enrich its image archive, or increase our awareness of the textures and transformations of African culture in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.”

      Sidibé's first home was a Peul (Fulani) village. After finishing school in 1952, he trained as a jewelry maker and then studied painting at the École des Artisans Soudanais (now the Institut National des Arts) in Bamako, graduating in 1955. In 1956 he was apprenticed to French photographer Gérard Guillat and began to photograph the street life of Bamako, capturing the spirit of the city's inhabitants as Mali made the transition from colony to independent country. In particular, Sidibé chronicled the carefree youth culture at dance clubs and parties, at sporting events, and on the banks of (or in) the Niger River. His remarkably intimate shots show exuberant young Africans intoxicated with Western styles in music and fashion. Although he continued his street work and close association with young Malians for another 20 years, in 1958 Sidibé opened his own commercial studio and camera-repair shop. There he took thousands of portraits, of both individuals and groups, creating dramatic images of subjects eager to assert their postcolonial middle-class identity, often with exaggerated idealized versions of themselves. After 1978 he worked exclusively in his studio.

      Sidibé's work was unknown outside his own country until the early 1990s, when European art critic André Magnin, who was in Bamako to visit another Malian photographer, Seydou Keïta, was taken to Sidibé's studio by mistake. Magnin began to publicize the photographs of Sidibé, and he published a monograph on the photographer in 1998. There followed an impressive number of group and solo exhibitions in Europe, the U.S., and Japan. In 2003 Sidibé received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. He has said of his work: “Art from Africa is admired because it has life, it has truth, it has purity.… The people of Mali will rediscover themselves in [my] photographs.”

K. Anne Ranson

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