Chronicling the rollicking nightlife of Mali
At the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in the Montparnasse district, the party was swinging. A group of chic Parisians was bobbing absent-mindedly to San Francisco, by the Gallic rock legend Johnny Hallyday.
Others were picking through a jumble of costumes and props in an improvised photo studio. Parisian art galleries aren’t renowned for their decadent party spirit, at least not on weekday afternoons. But the Cartier Foundation was doing its utmost to get into the groove. A few days earlier, it had opened Mali Twist, a show dedicated to the renowned Malian photographer Malick Sidibé, and now a highlight of this year’s Paris Photo week. Some 250 black- and-white photographs crowd the wall. In one, a pair of teen- age boys in wildly patterned bell bottoms pose moodily with a guitar. Nearby, a young woman in shades looks as if she were about to set off down a catwalk.
Billed as the largest Sidibé retrospective ever staged, and the first in continental Europe since the photographer’s death last year, Mali Twist pays tribute to a man who produced electrifyingly modern images of night life in the country’s capital, Bamako, in the 1960s and ’70s. On view through February 25, it also retells one of the most remarkable stories in contemporary art. After growing up in rural Mali, the son of a stock breeder, Sidibé worked full time as a photographer for just a few decades, before disappearing into obscurity. After being “discovered” by Western curators in the ’90s, he ended up being awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2007, the first photographer – and the first artist from Africa – ever to win that honour.
The show’s curator, André Magnin, recalled how he first encountered Sidibé, on a trip to Bamako in 1992. He had arrived on a mission to track down a photographer. Thatman was Seydou Keïta, whose pensive studio portraits of Malians in the 1950s later won worldwide acclaim.
While in Bamako, Magnin also met a man who spent his time mending cameras and taking passport photos in a run-down joint called Studio Malick. “In one night, in a few minutes, I met Keïta and Sidibé, two masters,” Magnin said.
Accustomed to depictions of tribes or shots of famine and conflict, Western viewers could scarcely believe their eyes: The idea that West African baby boomers spent the 1960s doing the twist or grooving to the Rolling Stones, like their contemporaries in Minneapolis and Marseille, was more than many could comprehend.
Manthia Diawara, a filmmaker, grew up near Studio Malick, part of a teenage group that called itself Les Rockers. In a phone interview from Senegal, he recalled how sitting for Sidibé became a rite of passage:
“You went to your tailor with your James Brown album, and you said to him, ‘I want my jacket to look exactly like this,’ and you’d do your hair like him, everything else. Then Malick would take your picture and make you immortal.”