Sanlé Sory

We cannot  wait to showcase at Our Gallery @ILAB-Design :

An iconic photographer from Burkina Faso:

  -SANLÉ SORY-

–The New York Times:

Extract from the New York Times
A WITNESS TO YOUTH CULTURE IN BURKINA FASO
By Fayemi Shakur Jan. 9, 2017
Florent Mazzoleni had been researching popular West African music and the history of artists from Burkina Faso when he grew entranced by the album covers shot by Sory Sanlé. Though the country was poor, its cultural scene was vibrant, especially as seen by Mr. Sanlé, a 74-year-old local photographer. Intrigued, Mr. Mazzoleni set out to find him.
“When I met Sory outside his studio, he was burning some negatives from his archives because he said people didn’t care about the old stuff,” said Mr. Mazzoleni, a French author and record producer. “I spent all night looking at his photos and negatives with a flashlight. He has tens of thousands of photos from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. He gave me a box of negatives that I could print. That’s how our relationship began.”
Since that meeting, Mr. Mazzoleni has spent much time with Mr. Sanlé, helping the photographer preserve his work. He created a website for him and hopes to gain more exposure for Mr. Sanlé’s contributions to the photographic canon. After his first exhibition curated by Mr. Mazzoleni in 2013 at the Institut Français du Burkina Faso, both in Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, Mr. Sanlé was interviewed on national television and became a local hero.
Though Mr. Sanlé’s work documenting the cultural scene is reminiscent of that by Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita — revered African photographers — he had been working more or less on his own. He never set out to become famous: In his hometown of Bobo-Dioulasso, one of the largest cities and cultural capital of Burkina Faso, he was seen as a craftsman. In some ways, his experiences show that although photography studios became popular in the 1960s in most major African cities, there is much still left to discover.“Mr. Sanlé’s work documenting the cultural scene is reminiscent of that by Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keita..and now it is his turn to be  lionized.”