Sidibé’s African composition

The bare facts of Malick Sidibé’s photographic career are easily gleaned from anthologies on African photography or from the catalogues of his shows in Europe and the United States.

These facts provide a comforting starting point for the uninitiated, and our reliance on them points to the ways in which criticism has approached African photography — contextually and historically. Ironically, while the historicist approach to African photography may be said to have sprung from a Marxist analysis of African history in general, we may now level against it the accusation that it fails to take stock of the aesthetic qualities of images by African photographers. Or we may bemoan the fact that while pictures made by non-African photographers have been allowed to be ‘about themselves”, the work of artists from the continent are always and only about their place in a historico-political trajectory. It is not unlike suggesting that an African photographer is first African and then a photographer, while an American photographer (for example) is first a photographer and then an American. In this debate, critics from opposite ends of the political spectrum often find themselves to be unexpected bedfellows.

So, as we are damned both ways, we will first take the path of least resistance and begin with Sidibé’s birth in a small town called Soloba, in 1935 or 1936, in the French Sudan (later Mali). He was trained as a jewellery maker and then went on to study painting at l’École des Artisans du Soudan in Bamako.

From 1956 he was apprenticed to the French photographer Gérard Guillart (popularly known as Gégé la pellicule), and then opened his own commercial studio in Bamako in 1962, following the lead of photographers such as Seydou Keita (1923 to 2001), 13 years Sidibé’s senior and Abderramane Sakaly (1926 to 1988). Sidibé, who also repairs cameras in his studio, has produced thousands of portraits and street scenes. He continues to live and work in Bamako.

Under Modibo Keita, the first president after independence in 1960, the studio photographers of Mali, like their counterparts in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Nigeria and Ghana, flourished in what later came to be seen as the Golden Age of West African portraiture — before the arrival of colour photography and instant processing. Taking thousands of portraits of middle-class citizens, and providing passport photographs for countless working people drifting across national boundaries, these photographers created a record of life in the new, post-colonial republics.

Sidibé — like his older compatriot Sakaly — did not, however, confine himself to studio portraiture. He did the rounds of the clubs and parties in Bamako, documenting young Malians at play, and often followed revellers to the banks of the Niger River where their festivities went on long after daybreak.

But, by his own admission, Sidibé was not a documentary photographer in the strict sense of the word, and indeed his work does not display the reportage style of photographers working for the National Malian Information Agency (later the Malian Press and Publicity Agency). Instead, his images of Bamako nightlife are an extension of the studio work in which he was far from being a passive observer and recorder. In both settings he played an important role, in the ways in which people presented themselves to be photographed, often arranging their poses and — in the studio — providing backdrops to create a particular mood or construct an idealised identity for his subjects.

Sidibé’s work on the streets of Bamako signals an important moment in the evolution of photography in West Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Commentators often remark that the street photographers who emerged in African cities after independence (17 African countries gained independence in 1960) quickly filled the gap left by European photographers who had departed these urban centres after the end of colonial rule.

The movement of African photographers out of studios and into the streets was made easier not only by this exodus, but also by the advent of smaller cameras and hand-held flashes.

These photographer-entrepreneurs became fixtures at the many public and private events in the cities of North and West Africa, documenting all aspects of urban life of the period and helping to define national and local identities. Despite the fact that many of the photographs of the time are deeply personal accounts of identity, characterised by a tangible social contract between photographers and their subjects.

Importantly, these photographs not only record identity and subjectivity, but are the manifestation of a particular kind of entrepreneurship and of the recognition of the relationship between the aesthetic and the commercial.

In 1978, Sidibé abandoned street photography and went back to working exclusively in his studio (though he had, in fact, never ceased studio portraiture throughout this period). In this medium, he is clearly an heir to the tradition of the postcard photographers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — European as well as African.

Sidibé’s portraiture, like that of his contemporaries in West Africa, seems to revel in a moment in which it is possible to be ahistorical and apolitical, in which one can, like the revellers he followed from party to party, forget chronology, if only for a moment. In his work, photography is not a reaction against something — political events, European Modernism. It is an aesthetic — sometimes poignant, often playful — exploration of self-confidence.

The details

Bronwyn Law-Viljoen is a Jo’burg-based critic and managing editor with David Krut Publishing. This essay is an excerpt from a longer essay to be published in the March 2007 issue of Art South Africa.