Chemises

Chemises takes its subject from the edges of Malick Sidibé's archive rather than its center: the plain cardboard folders — chemises, French for both "shirts" and "folders" — in which he handed Bamako clients their prints and negatives from the 1960s through the 1970s.

Stamped, labeled, and worn from handling, these folders carried the ordinary bureaucratic marks of a working studio: order numbers, customer names, dates. Steidl designed the book itself to mimic that object. The volume reads as a photograph album with prints pasted directly onto its pages, rather than a conventional plate-by-plate monograph. It was published in 2007 to accompany an exhibition co-presented by Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam and the Musée Nicéphore Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône, and it shifts attention from the nightlife and portrait images for which Sidibé is best known toward the material culture and everyday economy of studio photography in Bamako.

Sidibé (1936–2016) ran his Bamako studio from 1958, photographing the city's youth culture, dance halls, and social life through the years around Malian independence. He became the first photographer and the first African artist to receive the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, in 2007, the same year Chemises was published. His major monographs include the 1998 Scalo retrospective edited by André Magnin.