Malick Sidibé

From Soloba to Bamako

Malick Sidibé was born in Soloba, a village in southern Mali, about 300 kilometres from Bamako; sources give the year as 1935 or 1936. Noticed for his drawing, he was sent to study at a school of crafts in Bamako, then the capital of French Sudan. In the 1950s he went to work for a French photographer in the city, learned the trade, and in 1962 — two years after independence — opened his own studio, Studio Malick, in the Bagadadji neighbourhood, in the heart of Bamako; sources differ on the year, giving 1958, 1960 or 1962.

The nights

Bamako in the 1960s was full of young people who had grown up in a new country and wanted to look like it. They formed clubs, threw parties, danced to rock'n'roll, twist and Cuban music, and dressed with care. Sidibé went with them. On a good weekend he might cover several parties a night, then print the pictures and pin them up outside his studio for people to find themselves and order copies.

His soirée pictures forged his reputation as a "reporter of the youth". The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the dancing in his 1960s party pictures was to records from the Beatles to Cuban cha-cha-cha. The photographs are joyful and intimate: couples dancing barefoot, friends showing off their clothes and records, swimmers on the banks of the Niger. Sidibé was trusted, and it shows. A 1963 picture of a young couple dancing, Nuit de Noël (Happy Club), became one of his most reproduced images; the Fondation Cartier describes it as an instant snatched from time, of infinite softness and gentleness.

How to look at a Sidibé party picture: find the dance floor's edge, since he often shoots from the side of the crowd and the room is part of the picture. Then look at the clothes, which the sitters have chosen for the camera, and at the way each person holds their body for it. The pictures are made with people, not of them, and that is why they feel warm. This reading is the site's own.

The studio

By day, and increasingly in the 1970s as the party scene faded, Sidibé made portraits in the studio, against striped backdrops and patterned floors, of sitters who brought their own props and attitude. He also repaired cameras for much of his life.

Recognition

His work reached international audiences in the 1990s — the decade in which the Rencontres de Bamako, the African photography biennale, was founded in his city in 1994. Recognition followed: in 2003 he became the first African photographer to receive the Hasselblad Award, whose citation praised how he captured the atmosphere and vitality of an African capital, and in 2007 he received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale — the first given to a photographer and the first to an African artist. He died in Bamako on 14 April 2016.

Mali Twist

The Fondation Cartier in Paris presented Malick Sidibé: Mali Twist from 20 October 2017 to 25 February 2018, a year after his death. It was billed as the largest solo exhibition of his work, conceived and directed by André Magnin with Brigitte Ollier, and showed more than 250 photographs, some never before seen in public. Its title echoes a 1963 song by Boubacar Traoré.

Where to see the work

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds Sidibé prints, among them Les Frères et Sœurs (1967), and the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College and the Fondation Cartier list his work in their collections. Ask each which pieces are on display; the Fondation Cartier's Mali Twist pages remain a good record of the 2017 show.

Related artists

Sidibé is inseparable from Seydou Keïta, the older Bamako studio photographer whose formal portraits of the 1950s capture the city a decade earlier. For the wider story, read our guide to African photography. For music from the same West African dance floors, see mbalax and highlife. See our list of African photographers.