Malick Sidibé Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement

The winner of the Golden Lion Award of the 52nd International Art Exhibition has been named; he is Malick Sidibé from the African state of Mali.

The winner of the Golden Lion Award of the 52nd International Art Exhibition has been named; he is Malick Sidibé from the African state of Mali. The 72-year old master has received Award for contribution to photoart. As related by BBC News, the main prize of the biennial is awarded to the photographer for the first time in the history of the Exhibition.

Malick Sidibé, the owner of prestigious premium Hasselblad (2003), studied in Bamako, the capital of Mali, as a jeweler, but in the middle 1950's started to study photography under the French master Gerard Gijja, and in 1962 opened his own studio. Black-and-white pictures of local young musicians have brought him world glory. His works have been displayed in the largest museums in Europe and America.

The Art Director of the Venetian Biennial, Robert Storr, has noted, that no African artist has made such an impression in the past. In the text of the press release on the occasion of the award of "the Gold lion" it is said of Sidibé that "it was possible to keep the individual shapes of many people when all of them together created a new society".

Photography has been perhaps the most widely and inventively used artistic medium in Africa in the post- colonial era, as a spate of recent exhibitions has clearly shown. As they have also demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt, no African artist has done more to enhance photography’s stature in the region, contribute to its history, enrich its image archive or increase our awareness of the textures and transformations of African culture in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first than Malick Sidibé.

Operating primarily from a small studio on one of the busiest streets of central Bamako, the capital of Mali, Sidibé has been the signal portraitist of his city and nation and the intimate observer of the Malian musical scene. Like August Sander, the great German photographer, he has preserved the likenesses of countless individuals while in the process recording the face of the rapidly changing society they, as citizens, have collectively brought into being.

For the 52nd Biennale of 2007 Sidibé has joined forces with the organizers of the project “Les Africains Chantent Contre le SIDA/Africans Sing Against AIDS” to take pictures of the contestants in a countrywide competition for singers and song writers who composed and performed works in Mali’s various languages designed to provide information about the disease, its prevention and its treatment. The unique presence of each of the contestants is the fruit of a collaboration between the subject and the photographer, a collaboration subtly guided by his unfailing tact and captured by his acute eye. At 72, Malick Sidibé is the undisputed master of his photographic generation. No artists anywhere is more deserving of the 2007 Biennale of Venice's Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, and none more worthy of being the first African so honored.

Source: www.labiennale.org

Malick Sidibé (born 1935 or 1936) is Malian photographer noted for his black-and-white studies of popular culture in the 1960s in Bamako. He was born in Soloba, Mali and completed his studies in design and jewelry in the École des Artisans Soudanais (now the Institut National des Arts) in Bamako. In 1955, he undertook an apprenticeship at Gérard Guillat-Guignard's Photo Service Boutique, also known as Gégé la pellicule.

In 1958, he opened his own studio (Studio Malick) in Bamako and specialized in documentary photography, focussing particularly on the youth culture of the Malian capital. In the 1970s, he turned towards the making of studio portraits.

Sidibé was able to increase his reputation through the first meetings on African photography in Mali in 1994. His work is now exhibited in Europe (for example, the Fondation Cartier in Paris), the United States and Japan.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

"Malick Sidibé got off to a late but flying start in the international art-scene with an exhibition in Paris in 1995. Since then curators and gallery owners all round the world have been vying to show his photos. Born in 1935 or 36 in a small village in Mali, he has been known in his homeland for decades as a chronicler of youth culture. His photos, taken at parties and in dance-clubs, but also in poor boroughs and on the streets of Bamako, are notable for their immediacy, intensity and authenticity."

Pictures full of music