Malick Sidibé - Chemise Arrosage Mouna Tankara 18-7-70
Malick Sidibé
Arrosage Mouna Tankara 18-7-70
Vintage silver gelatin prints on card
11 4/5 × 19 7/10 in
30 × 50 cm
Mali

This is a unique work.

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About chemises

The chemises were Malick Sidibé's personal reference system for ordering prints and each is unique. Many images within the chemises do not exist in any other form, as prints were not ordered, and negatives have often not survived. These chemises provide a unique insight into the social life of Bamako, Mali, in the 1960s and 70s.

Similar chemises are part of the collections of Centre Pompidou museum in Paris and MOMA in New York: 

https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/recherche/oeuvres?terms=malick%20sidib%C3%A9

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/289610

Malick sometimes made up to five reports in one night before returning to the lab to develop the negatives and display on the studio walls index prints which were carefully numbered and glued in administrative folders. In the following days the partiers came around to look at these folders and select the photos that they wanted to buy. 

Often photographing parties late into the night, Sidibé would then return to his studio to process and print his film so the partygoers could come by and place orders the next day. The small proof prints were mounted onto colored folders called chemises, and each one was grouped according to the club or event. Presented here in their original album format, these chemises include Sidibé's own hand-written annotations and make up a significant part of the artist's oeuvre. They bear witness to the pervasive sense of freedom and identity among the youth and trace the rapid social, cultural and political transformation in postcolonial Mali.

About Malick Sidibé

Born in 1935 in Soloba, Mali, Malick Sidibé first studied drawing at the École des Artisans Soudanais [now the National Institute for the Arts] in Bamako, graduating in 1955.

Malick Sidibé is interested in photojournalism and has been documenting the younger generations of Malians since independence.

Beginning in the 1970s, he took portraits in his ‘Studio Malick’ (open since 1962), for which he became famous.

Malick Sidibé became, alongside Seydou Keïta, a role model for the younger generation of studio photographers, who would often cite his visual language.

His photography can be found in international collections such as MoMA, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, LaSalle Bank, Chicago and the Art Museum of Princeton University, New Jersey.

Malick Sidibé passed away on April 14, 2016 in Bamako.