Malick Sidibe

Malick Sidibé, was a Malian photographer who created mainly black-and-white images that revealed the gradual Westernization of Mali as it made the transition from colony to an independent country.

Sidibé’s first home was a Peul (Fulani) village. After finishing school in 1952, he trained as a jewellery maker and then studied painting at the École des Artisans Soudanais (now the Institut National des Arts) in Bamako, graduating in 1955. That year he was apprenticed to French photographer Gérard Guillat, and in 1957 he began to document the everyday life of Bamako. 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 of 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 idealised 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 publicise 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 United States, and Japan. His work received international acclaim with solo exhibitions dedicated to his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée Pincé in Angers among others. In 2003 Sidibé received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, and was also the recipient of the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 2007 Venice Biennale, one of the art world’s highest honours. He died in 2016 at the age of 80.