Mali bid a final farewell on Saturday to Malick Sidibe, an award-winning photographer considered a national treasure for his unique studio portraits and candid black-and-white depictions of popular culture in his West African homeland.
BAMAKO: Mali bid a final farewell on Saturday to Malick
Sidibe, an award-winning photographer considered a national treasure for
his unique studio portraits and candid black-and-white depictions of
popular culture in his West African homeland.
From humble beginnings in Mali's capital Bamako, Sidibe, who
died at the age of 80 on Thursday, rose over the course of a career
that spanned six decades to become one of Africa's most decorated
artists.
Hundreds of people - from Mali's arts scene, Sidibe's family
and the government - gathered on a football pitch in Daoudabougou, the
Bamako neighbourhood where he lived much of his life in a modest house
among extended family.
Soldiers saluted his body, which was wrapped in a cloth
according to Muslim tradition and draped in Mali's tricolour flag of
green, yellow and red.
"He's a piece of world heritage. It's not just Bamako, or Mali, or
Africa," said Igo Diarra, director of Bamako's Medina Gallery.
"He was always accessible, always smiling and generous. He
told people to always be very honest in their art and not follow what is
fashionable, but instead to concentrate on their work and do what they
love," he said.
Sidibe's instantly recognisable images from the 1950s and
60s of sharply dressed teenagers twisting on nightclub dance floors or
mugging for the camera in bathing suits captured Mali's transformation
from a French colony to a modern independent nation.
"IT'S A WORLD, SOMEONE'S FACE"
In the process, he shattered stereotypes of Africa and connected it with the rest of the world.
"The youth he photographed shared the same struggles for
equality and freedom with black Americans, who listened to Sam Cooke and
Otis Redding and who danced," Malian art critic Chab Toure told
Reuters.
Later, at a studio where he welcomed visitors even in the
last years of his life, he turned to portraits, meticulously positioning
his subjects before basic backgrounds in a style that was both simple
and unique.
"To be a good photographer you need to have a talent to
observe and to know what you want," Sidibe told The Guardian newspaper
in a 2010 interview. "Equally, you need to be friendly, sympathique.
It's very important to be able to put people at their ease. It's a
world, someone's face."
Sidibe meticulously archived his photographs and he had
already accumulated a sizeable body of work when his art began gaining
international recognition in the 1990s, a period when Malian painters
and musicians were also breaking out.
His images have since been exhibited around the world,
including at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of
Art as well as the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Guggenheim
Museum in Bilbao, Spain.
In 2007, he became both the first photographer and the first
African to win the Venice Biennale's lifetime achievement award. He was
also honoured with a Hasselblad Award, a lifetime achievement award
from the International Center of Photography and a World Press Photo
prize.
(Writing by Joe Bavier; Editing by Gareth Jones)
- Reuters
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