There was nothing calculated about it.” HE DOCUMENTED BOBO-DIOULASSO’S MUSICAL HEYDAY Boys and girls could now have fun together, without worrying about the future. “Natural haircuts à la Nina Simone proliferated, as did bell-bottom trousers. “A certain permissiveness was quickly allowed and people were able to relax,” explains Mazzoleni. Sanlé’s portraits lay bare a more liberal, insouciant and consumer-driven society quickly coming to the fore, with his subjects’ Bob Marley and Bruce Lee T-shirts, fondness for cars, vinyl records, boomboxes and soft drinks. Especially the cosmopolitan city of Bobo-Dioulasso (Sanlé’s hometown), with its sizeable Ghanaian, Malian, Ivorian and Nigerian communities who all flocked there to work. Post independence, Upper Volta, a landlocked country sandwiched between Togo, Benin, Ghana, Niger, Mali and Ivory Coast, found itself at the crossroads of tradition and modernity. HIS PICTURES SPEAK TO UPPER VOLTA’S NEWFOUND OPTIMISM We have a whole series of such photos that hasn’t yet been exposed.” But very quickly, one of Sanlé’s cousins funded his first pieces of equipment, he rented out a small space, and the Volta Photo portrait studio was born in 1965. “He would take pictures of wrecked cars and accidents. “At the time, there were still some newspapers in Bobo, but very few cars on the road,” explains Mazzoleni. After apprenticing with a Ghanaian photographer for a few months, the young Sanlé began covering car crashes for newspapers. Sanlé began taking pictures in 1960, the year his country achieved independence (and was then the Republic of Upper Volta). HE CUT HIS TEETH COVERING THE ACCIDENT BEAT FOR NEWSPAPERS We reached out to Mazzoleni to learn more about the unsung man who documented Upper Volta’s newly emboldened youths and sweeping sense of optimism with his Rolleiflex twin-lens, medium-format camera. A career retrospective is also in the works at the illustrious Art Institute of Chicago, slated for May 2018. It’s only been four years since his first exhibition at the French Institute of Burkina Faso, and this week marks Sanlé’s first international exhibition at London’s Morton-Hill Gallery, along with Sory Sanlé: Volta Photo 1965-85, a hardback book published by Reel Art Press. And over time, the 74-year-old came to see how his underrated body of work bears witness to a country undergoing swift cultural, economic and social transformations, torn between the pull of a modern European lifestyle and the region’s time-honoured traditions. Mazzoleni has since taken on the role of Sanlé’s archivist, single-handedly convincing him to stop burning his 200,000+ untouched negatives from the era. It quickly dawned on Mazzoleni that most of the era’s record sleeves had been the work of Sanlé, whose pictures eventually found their way into Mazzoleni’s retrospective box set, Bobo Yéyé: Belle Époque in Upper Volta. In doing so, he came upon Burkinabe Sory Sanlé’s eye-popping photographs of a freshly cosmopolitan Bobo-Dioulasso (the country’s second largest city), its singular energy, bustling youth culture and exuberant music community. That’s something French author and producer Florent Mazzoleni has unexpectedly found himself immersed in since 2011, when he began amassing hard-to-find vinyl records from Burkina Faso’s Afro-funk (or “Bobo Yéyé”) heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. As a result, new images and image-makers are still finding their way into our growing visual record of self-determination and dynamism in post-colonial African societies. But it’s nothing short of a curatorial crime that we haven’t managed to dig deeper and shine a light on a broader spectrum of artists. They’ve all built up remarkable bodies of work: Sidibé’s black-and-white snaps of fashion-forward Bamako youths Keïta’s predilection for elegant monochromatic tableaux with clashing patterns and Fosso’s intimate, at times satirical, self-portraits, pointing to a fragmented cultural identity. Invariably, when there’s chatter in the western press about 20th-century portrait photographers who documented the nascent cultural emancipation in post-colonial Africa, three names crop up: Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta – both Malian – and the Central African Republic-based Samuel Fosso.
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