The Party as Studio, Sanlé Sory, Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, (ed. Shanay Jhavari), The Shoestring Publisher, June 2024

Essay on Sanlé Sory for Night Fever, an illustrated compendium of artist portfolios and essays that consider the unique conditions of the night-time world and its transgressive and transformational possibilities. The book comprises 20 photography portfolios by a diverse, international and intergenerational group of artists as well as 21 essays about films made during and about the night.Co-published with The Shoestring Publisher, Sweden. Edited by Shanay Jhavari, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, London.

Extract:

“There were none where I came from,” replied the Burkinabe photographer Sanlé Sory when asked by curator Matthew Witkovsky (ahead of an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018) if, on arriving in Bobo from his birth village Naniagara in 1957, he already had a camera or had encountered a photograph.

His response explains Sory’s ability to transcend the confines of photographic
practice, and to question – sometimes consciously, sometimes seemingly without intent – what an image could be, or what an image-maker could produce. What transmorphic process could take place for the subject before the camera? And how could music and dancing, so integral to that process of transformation and fantasy, exist within the image?

Could photographs even capture the beat itself? Could the vibrating rhythms be
audible enough right there in the picture if you searched for them, if you knew them? One cannot understand Sory’s pictures without thinking about music, about movement – about the dance parties that he arranged as a place to take photographs, about the lively sounds playing constantly in his studio as his subjects did their best to both become and transcend themselves.

This is not to say that Sory’s photographic career was always about deliberately confronting the typical. Things started pragmatically – he had the idea to become an image-maker on arriving in Bobo, when his ID photo was taken (a requirement for those living in cities). After three years of working as an assistant to Kojo Adomako, he set up his own studio, Volta Photo, servicing requests for ID pictures and the kind of playful style-rich “souvenir” images – recognizable from their bold backdrops and playful props – that have become synonymous with the work of other great African image-makers working from the 1950s onwards, including Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, Sory became an avid organizer of “bush parties” for
open-air dancing – known as “bal poussière” – in the countryside around Bobo, the ticket and photo sales providing a revenue stream. His technicians were brought along to collect the fees at the door, man the generator and keep the music going, while he roved the scene, shooting the revellers with his camera. The party became a pulsing, ever-changing studio, reliant not on a particular light or backdrop, but on the sounds and the atmosphere of independence sold to its attendees. “It’s the flash that tells you the party’s started. I had that idea. [ Instead of ] speaking into the microphone, I went ‘peep peep peep’ at the door,” Sory told Witkovsky. He saw the camera as a catalyst, the photograph as a memento, even as a mirror.