Surprise Party, Ambassade Haute Volta

Born in a small village in rural Mali, Sidibe moved to the nation's capital in in Bamako and graduated at the Ecole des Artisans Soudanais. After apprenticing with a French photographer in the late 1950s, he opened his own portrait studio in 1962. It was a special and optimistic moment in Malian history, just two years after the country's independence from France. Sidibe became famous early in his career documenting the events and ceremonies enacted by groups of young men and women who expressed their liberty by joining "clubs" and dancing to records playing a wide range of Western music from the Beatles to Cuban cha cha cha. After each evening event, Sidibe printed a judicious selection of his portraits which he mounted on folding paper folders inscribed with the name of the party group and marked with index numbers connecting the prints to his massive negative archive. Celebrants then visited the studio and placed requests for the images they wished to purchase for their own collections. It is believed that Sidibe created some thousand such dossiers in the 1960s-70s: each one is filled with the rhythms of independence and dreams for a new beginning.