Malick Sidibé Was an Architect of Utopia and Purveyor of Nostalgia

THE STUDIO MIGHT reasonably be described as the ground zero of West African photography. There, trained professionals, typically men who had chanced on studio photography as a career, devoted themselves to picturing their clientele with ardor and originality. Malick Sidibé is the epitome of this model. The late Malian photographer made images of his Malian country-people that have, since the 1990s, become venerated as art objects, less as the individual keepsakes they were initially meant