"Everyone could become a hero at his Volta studio."
Sanlé Sory (Ibrahima Sanlé Sory, b. 1943, Burkina Faso) apprenticed with a Ghanaian photographer, learning to use a twin-lens Rolleiflex 6x6 camera and to process prints, and in 1960 opened his own studio, Volta Photo, in the centre of Bobo-Dioulasso, the cultural capital of what was then Upper Volta: the same year his country began its transition from remote French colony to independent nation. His studio was soon recognized as the finest in the city, and his portraits became the key documents of the exuberant youth culture that flowered with independence.
Fula villagers, elaborately dressed Malians and Voltaic teenagers, customers and loyal friends, populate his inventive black and white portraits: twenty-somethings playacting their favourite music icons, modelling modern fashions or showing off gym physiques, holding the props Sory provided to meet their taste for the modern, Air Afrique flight bags, radios, telephones, record players, lamps, plastic guns, a motorbike, against loosely painted backdrops of a cityscape at night, a beachside promenade, an airplane tarmac: anything, in his words, to help people make the picture their own. A democratic photographer in the fullest sense, at whose studio, as his rediscoverer Florent Mazzoleni put it, everyone could become a hero, Sory was also a protagonist of Bobo-Dioulasso's mighty music scene: regional reporter, event photographer, organizer of dance parties and official photographer of Volta Jazz, the great orchestra of the era, whose record sleeves he illustrated. His body of work demonstrates photography's unique place in the daily construction of Burkinabè identities and aspirations, and in the urbanization of a young nation negotiating its local, regional and international selves.
Sory's photographs were exhibited publicly only from 1998, and his international rediscovery came in 2016-2017, with first solo presentations in Morocco, Burkina Faso and the United Kingdom, where "Volta Photo 1965-85" at Morton Hill, London, accompanied the monograph published by Reel Art Press with Florent Mazzoleni. His work featured in "Autophoto" at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris (2017), and in 2018 the Art Institute of Chicago presented "Volta Photo: Starring Sanlé Sory and the Good People of Bobo-Dioulasso in the Small but Musically Mighty African Country of Burkina Faso", curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, his first U.S. solo museum exhibition, an immersive installation of over one hundred photographs, studio objects and the music of the era, with a catalogue published by Steidl. Gallery exhibitions followed at Yossi Milo, New York (2018), M+B, Los Angeles (2020), Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta (2021), Weinstein Hammons, Minneapolis, and David Hill Gallery, London. His photographs have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fondation Cartier, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the RISD Museum and the Tang Museum at Skidmore College. His books include "Volta Photo 1965-85" (Reel Art Press, 2017), "Sanlé Sory: Volta Photo" (Steidl, 2018) and "Peuple de la Nuit" (Stanley/Barker, 2019). He lives and works in Bobo-Dioulasso.