A lightness of vision: the poetics of Relation in Malian art photography

Abstract

“Art photography” is a recent phenomenon in Bamako, Mali, home of renowned studio portraitists Seydou Keïta (1921/3–2001) and Malick Sidibé (b.1936). These photographers inspired the founding of the Bamako Photography Biennale in 1994, which sparked the rise of a local art photography movement. The potentialities offered by the Biennale ignited the imaginations of a small cohort of Malian photographers. Yet, instead of following global trends introduced by the presence of international art, the Bamakois art photographers have remained close to the values of studio portraiture. Their practices emphasise photography’s social aspect by focusing on the human body and appreciating its beauty, while allowing individual creativity to flourish in ways previously unimaginable. Malian photographers thus have retained a relatively autonomous local identity, while creating art photography stemming from a history of portraiture that itself was repositioned as art on the global stage. This dialectic between local identity and global reception gives contemporary Malian photographs the potential to embody Relation, from Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) and Philosophie de la Relation (2009). Relation acknowledges differences and diversity within wholeness or totality, and de-hierarchises power relations. Works by Alioune Bâ, Fatoumata Diabaté, Alimata dite Diop Traoré, Seydou Camara, Mohamed Camara, Emannual Daou and Youssouf Sogodogo exhibit a diversity of aesthetic approaches toward the theme of the body as a nexus of social networks, as a locus of memory, as marked by difference and as a site not only of desire, but of moral instruction. While Mali struggles with the violent after-effects of a military coup that ended two decades of peaceful democracy, these photographs commemorate that period of peace through their varied emphases on social interactions, the tolerance and celebration of difference, the importance given to personal and national memory and the traditional values of moral didacticism.