Sanlé Sory – The Volta Photo studio, Bobo-Dioulasso

Sanlé Sory was born in 1943 in Nianiagara, Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso. Trained in the late 1950s by the Ghanaian photographer Kodjo Adamako, he opened his own studio in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1960, the year of independence: Volta Photo.

For more than twenty years he photographed the people of the city there on a Rolleiflex 6×6, against painted backdrops, with a trunk of props his sitters made their own: sunglasses, transistor radio, telephone, Air Afrique flight bag, moped. At night he followed the orchestras and the dance halls, illustrated the sleeves of the city’s 45 rpm records and staged his own bals poussière in the surrounding villages.

These images are not ethnographic documents. They are negotiated performances, in which each sitter decides how they want to be seen. Unseen publicly until 1998 and rediscovered in the 2010s, his work is now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.