Getting up close to Africa's first steps to freedom

Malian photographer Malick Sidibé has died at 80. Ntombenhle Shezi looks back on his life.

The first time I came across Malian photographer Malick Sidibé's work was in Janet Jackson's Got 'Til It's Gone music video. Released in 1997, the video is a beautiful depiction of the style and pan-African sensibilities of the '60s, making reference to Sophiatown, Drum magazine and a cameo of Sudanese supermodel Alek Wek.

Also featured are a few of Sidibé's photographs, which translate the style and movement of the people getting down in the video, while Jackson serenades them through a vintage microphone. The video personifies the pan-African ideal of "black is beautiful", something that Sidibé projected through his lens throughout his career.

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Born to a peasant family in French Sudan - Mali's colonial name - in 1935 or 1936, he left his shepherding duties at the age of 10 to study at a colonial school where he was one of only a handful of black pupils.

His artistic talent was quickly noticed and he won a place at École des Artisans Soudanais in Bamako in 1952. The course of his career changed when he was approached by society photographer Gérard Guillat, who asked him to become his apprentice.

"I manned the cash register, delivered the photos, handled the cash, sold equipment. I did all that to begin with. And then in 1956 I bought my first amateur camera," Sidibé said in an interview in 2008. "[Guillat] didn't teach me how to take photographs. But I watched him and I understood how to take photographs."

While working at the studio, Sidibé cycled to nightclubs in Bamako in the evenings, photographing partygoers with his first camera, a Brownie Flash.

With the coming of Malian independence in 1960, those images took on a deeper layer of meaning.

"We were entering a new era, and people wanted to dance," Sidibé said. "Music freed us. Suddenly, young men could get close to young women, hold them in their hands. Before, it was not allowed. And everyone wanted to be photographed dancing up close."

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Opening his own studio in 1962, he shot tens of thousands of photographs there and on the city's streets. He would regularly go to nightclubs and bars in the early hours, documenting the country's burgeoning nightlife.

"Music liberated African youth from the taboo of being with a woman," he said.

"They were able to get close to each other, which is why I was always invited to these parties. I had to go in order to record these moments, when a young man could dance with a young woman close up.

"At night, from midnight to 4am or 6am, I went from one party to another. I could go to four different parties."

Sidibé's Studio Malick became one of the hottest hangouts in town. Just like any modern-day street-style photographer, Sidibé captured people looking unapologetically stylish. Studio Malick was the place where groups of young people would go to get themselves snapped wearing the finest styles - sunglasses with exaggerated frames, the latest florals, high-waisted bell-bottoms and dapper suits.

"Often it was like a party," Sidibé said. "People would drop by, stay, eat. I slept in the developing room. They'd pose on their Vespas, show off their new hats and trousers and jewels and sunglasses. Looking beautiful was everything. Everyone had to have the latest Paris style.

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"We had never really worn socks, and suddenly people were so proud of theirs, straight from Saint-Germain-des-Près."

It was "a fantastic period, unique", he told The Guardian in a 2010 interview.

But beyond merely capturing the style of Mali's young generation, Sidibé's work highlighted the momentous social and cultural change of a nation in flux. In their newly independent country, Malians were articulating liberation through their style and attitude - a mix of pan-Africanism and rock'n'roll, with many taking their sartorial cues from the likes of James Brown and Mick Jagger, while engaging with the revolutionary thoughts of Patrice Lumumba and Angela Davis.

Sidibé was the first African to have a solo exhibition at the Grand Palais museum in Paris and, in 2003, the first to win the Hasselblad prize. In 2007, he became the first African and the first photographer to win the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.

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Up until his last days, Sidibé lived and worked in the same one-room studio, welcoming all visitors and surrounded by his family and neighbours.

Away from the formalities of conventional portrait photography, away from the clichés of colonialism, Sidibé's pictures of Mali's youth conveyed the high-spirited feeling of a country that has just gained its freedom. Over the years, his black-and-white pictures have influenced many of his contemporaries in Africa and beyond.

His photography will be remembered as having given agency to people whose image was, and to some extent still is, exoticised or "othered" through a Western lens.

- Additional sources: The Daily Telegraph, London, and Time magazine