Malick Sidibé was born in 1935, in the small village of Soloba, Mali. He stood out quickly because of his talent for drawing and his tutors encouraged him to enlist in the School for Soedanese Arts in Bamako. He graduates in Jewellery and Design but starts his career in a totally different field: the decoration the Photo Service boutique, where he will become the pupil of owner Gérard Guillat. Three years later, he opens his own "Studio Malick", where he still works. Where Keita photographed people in his small studio, Sidibé has become the father of the streets of Mali. He is also one of the only reporters to have covered all of the news of that time.

These photographs cover the broad range of Sidibé’s studio practice since the opening of his Studio Malick in Bamako, Mali, in 1962. Among the images are family, group and individual portraits, as well as images taken in the clubs and streets of Bamako and a new series of images showing the bare backs of Sidibé’s models. The works include vintage prints under painted glass and handmade paper and tape frames along with newly printed editions.

In the sixties and seventies he focussed solely on the local youth. Caught in surprise snapshots, or posing leisurely, these youngsters drag him along on their numerous wanderings. To sports events, relaxing on the beach, a fight in the nightclub Happy Boys or the Surf Club, out to a concert or seducing girls.

If Malick Sidibé's images emanate so much power, it is because beyond the convivial and careless atmosphere he also illustrates the difficulty of having to adapt to life in the city. The confrontation with unemployment and alcohol, the irresistible desire to be like young whites. The pictures reflect the artist: convivial, intimate and yet not voyeuristic, they tell of a great complicity between the artist and his subjects. Like that other photographer Keita, Sidibé too has had to wait until the nineties to get recognition outside his own country.

Since his first exhibitions in Europe and the United States over a decade ago, Malick Sidibé has achieved renown internationally as one of the premiere documentarians of the personal and cultural changes of post-colonial Africa. His highly specific and dramatically patterned studio settings frame the look and aspirations of generations of individuals in Bamako. Capturing the changing fashions and characteristic dress of the average citizen Sidibé, like August Sander, has written the history of his countrymen in thousands of black and white photographs. The latest images in the current exhibition include not only new portraits but images taken by Sidibé at his own expense of the backs of men, women and groups of individuals. Sidibé has described his motivation for taking these new images.

Malick Sidibé documented an important period of West African history with great commitment, enthusiasm, and insight, focusing on Malian youth in the 1950s and 60s. His portraits and documentary photography captured the unique atmosphere and vitality of an African capital in a period of great euphoria. From the earliest days of the postcolonial period, Sidibé was a privileged witness to a period of tremendous, euphoric cultural change.

As a young but well thought-of photographer, Sidibé captured a time of paradigm shift and youthful insouciance with a healthy curiosity about the rest of the world, and a valiant sense of pride and confidence in the future. Sidibé learned the basic skills of studio photography as an apprentice before he began making reportage photographs. Since then, he has been devoted to photography.

His portraits and documentary photographs, from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, now bear witness to the cultural and social development of post-colonial Mali. We see joy, hope, beauty, and power in these psychologically captivating images. Sidibé work, originally intended for an African audience, is a unique memoir and testimony for a world audience.

Surprisingly intimate, the portraits reveal the poignant physicality behind the elaborate dress, costumes and props which have become so associated with the “classic” Sidibé style. Malick Sidibé is the 2003 recipient of The Hasselblad Award. Recent exhibitions include The Cartier Foundation (solo), Paris, France, 2004, “African Art, African Voices,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, 2004, and “Common Ground, Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art”, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC, 2004. Sidibé’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, Birmingham Museum of Art, AL, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and the International Center of Photography, New York, NY, among numerous others.

Images and text courtesey of The Jack Shainman Gallery, New York US, Gallery 51, Antwerp, Belgium and Hackle Bury Fine Art, London, UK

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