Tidiani Shitou (1933–2000) - Toi et moi (1975)

Silver Gelatin Print - Signed

Across the names of Seydou Keita or Malik Sidibé, a Western popularity has emerged of an African photography where the human figure is predominant and which highlights the popularity of photography studios from the 1960s to the 1990s. But a multitude of other photographers, also working in the studio, still awaits discovery. And for the first time in Lyon, an art and photography gallery offers this possibility. The striking images of the doppelgänger of the Malian artist Tidiani Shitou (1933-2000) draw their source from the artistic and cultural specificities of West Africa. Formal specificities: think of symmetries, the hieratic quality and the contained energy of statuary, and symbolic specificities. His double portraits, portraits of parents, of friends, far from being limited to depicting a sentiment of fraternal love badenya (born of the same mother), convey other types of affective relationships between individuals. They emphasize the deep bond that unites two people. The photographer’s art lies in translating this bond through symbolic likeness, by intensifying the similarity between them through pose, clothing (sometimes loaned), accessories, the symmetry of composition, up to creating the illusion of total identification, of a shared doubling. His portraits thus celebrate a relationship while at the same time portraying it, using symbols: stereotyped twin-like images that are also found in sculpture and in many other objects of daily life in West Africa. They are not the immediate and realistic image of the individuals but rather the illumination of the duality of the person and the ideal model that the founding twin in the original myths represents. Protected by the gods, twins (although they are sometimes perceived as evil) bring happiness and symbolize harmony and fairness. They are a reminiscence of the origins of the world and they nourish a very fertile imagination in sub-Saharan Africa. This idea that each person is in search of their alter ego, of their complementary soul-mate - their twin - constitutes the very popular theme in West Africa of the double portrait often likened to a twin portrait. A portrait in which the individual does not disappear in favor of the double but, on the contrary, grows through their doubling. Tidiani Shitou demonstrates, in portraits of great historical, ethnological, and artistic value, that a resolutely contemporary aesthetics can be put at the service of traditional thought. He also shows that, thanks to photography, clients could reclaim their image, even recreate it, by playing with the different strata of their realities and inventing their own modernity and their history. One idea animates this “image maker” who sits between the visible and the invisible: to achieve, through mastery of an appropriate medium, the depiction of the mental image of a radical duality of the person. C. Angelo Micheli El Hadj Tidiani SHITOU (1933 - 2000) Studio Photo Kodak Olore, Mopti, Mali Tidiani Shitou, long regarded as the best photographer in his region, produced, from the 1970s to the year 2000, in his Studio Photo Gangal in Mopti, a substantial body of work. It consists of portraits but also of images of celebrations and ceremonies, made in black and white then in color. Yoruba born in Nigeria, he had first been a tailor and a merchant. In Mali since the late 1950s, he stayed in Gao in 1962 where he was trained by the Nigerian photographer Mahamane Awani, then in Bamako where he joined Malick Sidibé, before arriving in Mopti. There he continued his training alongside the Malian photographer Bosco Maïga and opened his studio in 1971. But curious about everything, he never ceased to travel across sub-Saharan Africa to absorb new ideas through contact with photographers and artists. His keen, tender, and amused gaze settled on his fellow citizens in a wide variety of portraits. The Peul, the Bozo, the Dogon, the Sarakole, the Bella and the Yoruba came to the Mopti Kodak Photo Studio (a very commercial city at the crossroads of the Djenné, Timbuktu and Dogon country routes) for the diversity of poses, the numerous accessories made available, and the quality of the images. At the crossroads of models drawn from Western studio photography and a local traditional heritage, he disseminated his knowledge in Mali. He is certainly one of the great propagators of the Ibeji portrait, a double-portrait achieved by superimposition developed by the Yoruba within the framework of the twin cult. He used 6x6 cameras and then a single-lens reflex for color. If his portraits today bear witness to the elegance and whimsy of a particular era, if they are rich historical and anthropological documents on the cultures, they are above all the reflection of an artistic work associated with the dreams of the models who aspired to another ideal reality. Some photographs by Shitou have entered private collections and the Sokkelund Museum of Copenhagen. They were presented at the Bamako Photography Meetings in 2001 and at the Indiana University Art Museum in April 2007. C. Angelo Micheli