"THE STUDIO MIGHT reasonably be described as the ground zero of West African photography. There, trained professionals, typically men who had chanced on studio photography as a career, devoted themselves to picturing their clientele with ardor and originality. Malick Sidibé is the epitome of this model. The late Malian photographer made images of his Malian country-people that have, since the 1990s, become venerated as art objects, less as the individual keepsakes they were initially meant to be, but as bona fide documents of a collective identity. In fact, in almost every essay about his work—or about other West African photographers with similar practices—one can find a version of the idea that he “pictured people as they wished to be seen.”"
November 6, 2025