Product Review

Acclaimed for his black-and-white photographs of 1960s youth culture in Bamako, Mali, Malick Sidibé (born 1936) is today the African continent's best-known photographer. Sidibé was recently awarded the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2007)--the first time this award was presented to a photographer--and the Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2008), in recognition of his contribution to documentary photography and the historical record. Malick Sidibé: La Vie en Rose provides a survey of this work, focusing primarily on Sidibé's images of Mali's buzzing youth culture and family life in Bamako in the 1960s and 70s. Laura Serani's foreword contextualizes Sidibé's work in a wider survey of African photography; the book also includes an interview with the photographer by Laura Incardona and an appendix with Sidibé's famous "chemises" (photographic dossiers), which documents his working methods.