HE pictures by 
Sedou Keita and Malik Sidibe in the Fruitmarket 
Gallery stem from a commercial contract between 
photographer and subject. Both photographers 
have been in business in Bamako, 
Mali, for many years doing portraiture and 
commercial 'reportage.' The photographs however, 
have been bought and eurated by the 
French organisation, Foundation Carrier pour Malian Snaps at the 
I'art contemporain, and 'exported' for the 
benefit of a European audience. We find ourselves 
in a fine art context looking at pictures 
from the Other, colonised world. 
One could superficially compare these photographs 
with some of Sebastio Salgado's Latin American 
work in the sense that Salgado, Keita and Sidibe were all Fruitmarket Gallery 
locals photographing within their own cultures. There are 
obviously great differences between Salgado and these 
two African portrait photographers but it is in the subtle 
shifts that one finds the real schism. Above all Sidibe's 
and Keita's pictures are the result of creative collaboration 
between themselves and their subjects. Looking at 
these pictures we find something which is intended, not 
for us, but rather for those people who are represented. 
Because of this, we have a quite different relationship to 
the subjects than we do when we look at, say, a portrait 
taken in Brazil by Salgado. In front of a picture by Malik 
Sidibe we are not in our accustomed position as spectators 
anymore. We have been moved out of the grandstand. 
The presence of these pictures in a gallery acts 
against notions of boundaries, both within and without 
the confines of the art world, and instead challenges the 
process of marginalisation. Of central importance in this 
is the position of the anonymous viewer as a witness to 
a dialogue between photographer and subject. 
GLENDORA, 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1
Sedou Keifa, Unfitted, 1952-55 
A/ricap Quarter/y 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA- ..
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA , 
Sedou Keita, Unfitted, 1956-57
With the crisis of representation 
thatphotography (along with many other 
fields) has experienced we have seen the 
development of new strategies as well as 
the modification of old practices. Throughout 
the last decade in Britain there has 
been a current of new documentary photography, 
often using colour, which has 
examined what might be called the underbelly 
of the mainstream. In attempting 
to close the gap between the audience 
and the subject a number of photographers 
have looked at things which they 
felt were closer to the lives of their imagined 
- gallery going - book buying - 
public. A generation of photographers 
like Martin Parr and laterly Anna Fox or 
Paul Reas seem to have attempted a new 
kind of engagement with the audience. 
Of this audience photographers envisage 
a certain amount of sophistication in 
regarding the ways of the medium and 
also a certain naivety. In the gallery 
context even the most literal work shows 
unusual ways of seeing the world which 
are part of the'strangeness'1 of photography. 
The incongruous nature of much 
photography, relies on an element of 
secrecy on the part of the photographer. 
We see the signs of unfamiliar lives or, in 
the case of this genre, the signs of our 
own lives made somehow unfamiliar. 
Much of the 'new' colour documentary of 
the Eighties which has since become 
established used this idea of looking 
askance at its subject, sometimes in an 
effort to make us look at ourselves as we 
look at the Other. Unfortunately the quasisatirical 
approach actually succeeds in 
reinforcing, rather than questioning the 
notion of the Other. Looking at the reportage 
of Malik Sidibe, even in the difficult 
context of this exhibition, we are not 
nearly as conscious of the presence of 
anthropological specimens as we are in 
much of the recent British documentary. 
Given the cultural and geographical distance 
between here and Mali, this must 
attest to the ease with which British documentary 
photographers have unwittingly 
placed their audiences out of the frame. 
hen photographers 
define 
themselves as 
cultural protagonists 
addressing 
their adversaries 
in the establishare 
bound to the 
subsuming nature 
of that establishment 
Some European and North American 
photographers in recenttimes, would 
seem for their different reasons, to have 
retreated somewhat from the theoretical 
and ethical difficulties surrounding the 
relationship between photographers and 
subjects, by confining their practice to 
more intimate groups of people. In a 
new critical climate, informed by the 
writing of people like Michel Foucault 
and Edward Said, grand narratives seem 
impossibly unwieldy and absurd, and 
some photographers look for arenas of 
more manageable proportions. This does 
not let us escape the fundamental issues 
of representation as the argument over 
Sally Mann's pictures of her family has 
underlined. 
The debates about representation 
have been incidental to the portraiture 
of Sidibe and Keita who have worked 
isolated from this and other discussions 
in photography since the beginning of 
their careers. Their role has been primarily 
a social one without a political 
agenda. Making portraits which satisfied 
their clients' social needs did, however, 
heighten their awareness of the 
cultural changes occurring in their country. 
Speaking about the Fifties, Keita 
says: 
'In those days the culture of our 
ancestors was beginning to disintegrate; 
city-dwellers began to dress Europeanstyle, 
they were influenced by France. 
But not everyone could afford to dress, 
like that. In the studio I had three different 
European suites, with tie, shirt, shoes 
and hat... the lot! And some props; 
biros, plastic flowers, a radio set and a 
telephone. Clients could use them to 
pose with.2 
Brought together the works of Keita 
and Sidibe chart the colonial and neocolonial 
experience in and upon the 
lives of the people they photographed. 
The pictures accumulate to give one the 
sense of a sea change which is only 
manifested in each picture in the smallest 
of ways. Because of the nature of the 
'contract' between the photographers 
and the photographed we do not see 
this in simplistic terms: we are aware of 
both invasion and assimilation. Particularly 
in Keita's portraits we often find a 
delicate and poignant balance which is 
lived and represented by the subjects. 
Meanwhile, Sidibe's own early career 
as described in his biographical statement 
is suggestive of the same kind of 
compromises: 
'One day, the head Teacher, 
having noticed I was good at drawing, 
asked me to do three drawings, because 
the Colonial Governor was coming 
to inspect the school. He was the one 
who helped me enrol at Bamako National 
Art School in 1952, and I left in 
1955 with a craft diploma in Jewellery. 
Being a Peul, I was not very happy with 
this, as members of this ethnic group do 
not work with their hands. At the end of 
the 1955 academic year Gerard 
Guillard, nicknamed Gege in Pelicolle 
the film came to the art school to look for 
a student who could decorate his shop 
and studio, Photo Service. I was the one 
who was chosen. Once I had finished 
the project, Gege suggested that I should 
continue to work for him. So I became 
his apprentice and started doing little 
jobs around the studio: matting, mounting, 
processing and delivering finished 
prints.'3
For those of us who address our 
photography firstly to our subjects, and 
not to an anonymous third party envis- 
Afrtcan Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/Ho. 1 GLENDORAr
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
GLENDORA r.ģi.. Vol. Z/No. 1 
Malik Sidibe, Untitled, April 1970
f 
Malik Sidibe, Untitled, April 1970 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA
aged as our audience, the works of Keita and Sidibe have the 
capacity to both affirm and question our practice. Above all, 
their work reveals a collaboration and in this sense it can be 
compared with some of the radical practice in British photography 
today. Theoretically informed and with a politically sophisticated 
agenda of representation photographers like David 
Hevey have collaborated with and addressed their work 'o their 
subjects. Whether it is part of a political/cultural strategy or a 
simple commercial negotiation, the effect on the viewer is 
similar. We witness a dialogue of representation using a visual 
language that is the creation of both photographer and subject. 
In the process that element of secrecy slips through the 
photographer's fingers but in return one finds a more specific 
and rigorous language. This dialogue draws the subjects into 
the discourse at the expense of any third party, for the keys of 
interpretation rest with the subjects and not with our cultural 
agents. 
The principal of the subject as audience cannot be neatly 
delineated along political lines. Onfe can find the practice 
across the cultural/political spectrum. Much of Nicholas Nixon's 
work which emerged from the modernist and humanitarian 
ethos is made using the same reflective techniques of representation 
though with a more conservative cultural agenda. 
Conversely, there is also a strand of radical thinking that 
dismisses the idea of the subject/audience as a 'guilt-tripping 
rhetorical question'.4 For some artists it is more important to 
know who or what one is speaking against. This however, 
seems a limiting and idealistic attitude that implies a fixed and 
impermeable barrier between what one is for and what one is 
against. When photographers define themselves as cultural 
protagonists addressing their adversaries in the establishment 
then they are naturally bound to the subsuming nature of that 
establishment. Some arguments take this into account and call 
for the continual abandonment of strategies and forms of 
representation as each inevitably becomes consumed and worn 
out.11 This is an easier theoretical than practical position. The 
normal and continual theoretical revision of artistic experience 
is not in any essential way a subtractive process on the part of 
the artist. To make a call for a kind of continual revolution in 
methods of representation one takes the position of a cultural 
agent rather than an artist. Meanwhile for the artist this does not 
signify a process of continual change, only a process of 
wastage which is dictated by the dominant culture. Nor can 
playing a dominant culture at its own game guarantee any 
meaningful shifts in attitude. Playing that game can be one way 
that another class of artists who represent a different vision enter 
the arts stage. Nevertheless the status quo between the art world 
and that Other world beyond will remain the same as long as 
artists, whoever they are, aim their work at that all consuming 
and anonymous third party. 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA. 
The pictures by Keita and Sidibe document the minor 
manifestations of the colonial and neo-colonial process in the 
lives of some ordinary and not so ordinary people. In this sense 
the people photographed are relatively passive actors, and of 
course that is only half the story. Neo-colonialism is not only a 
system of appropriation, it is only a system of cultural and 
economic betrayal. This missing aspect highlights the constraints 
of the photographers' contracts and also reveals an 
unusual and challenging parallel to the limitations of some of 
our own ideas. If we draw a line between those we represent 
and those we challenge we are inevitably creating an artificial 
boundary which takes no account of the dynamics of human 
behaviour. We risk being impossibly idealistic or smugly 
politically correct. If, on the other hand, we address our subject 
as our audience are we acting simply as an empowering mirror 
or can we engage in more complex and critical dialogues with 
our subjects? To do this the voices of those we represent have 
to be heard more clearly and take a more central role in our 
arenas. Perhaps then artists can start to deal more fully with the 
contradictions that underline not only all constructions but also 
all of our lives. GR 
Notes 
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography, the middle brow art. 
2. Sedou Keita, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 
3. Malik Sidibe, Fruitmarket Gallery 
4. Kobena Mercer, Ten. 8 - Critical Decade. 
5. Stuart Hall, David A. Bailey, Ten.8 - Critical Decade. 
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