Tidiani Shitou (1933–2000) - Les soeurs

Through the names of Seydou Keita or Malik Sidibé, a photograph of Africa has become popular in the West, where the human figure is preeminent and which highlights the popularity of photographic studios from the 1960s to the 1990s. But a multitude of other photographers, also working in studio, remain to be discovered. And for the first time in Lyon, an art and photography gallery offers this possibility. The astonishing images of the double of the Malian artist Tidiani Shitou (1933-2000) draw their source from the artistic and cultural specificities of West Africa. Formal specifics: think of symmetry, hieraticism, and the contained energy of statuary, and symbolic specifications. His double portraits, portraits of parents, of friends, far from being limited to depicting a brotherly love sentiment badenya (born of the same mother), translate other types of affective relations between individuals. They emphasize the deep bond that unites two people. The photographer’s art lies in translating this bond through symbolic resemblance, intensifying the similarity between them through pose, clothing (sometimes loaned), accessories, the symmetry of the composition, up to creating the illusion of total identification, of a duplicated self. His portraits then celebrate a relationship while representing it, using symbols: stereotyped twin images that are also found in sculpture and in many other everyday objects in West Africa. They are not the immediate, realistic image of the individuals but rather the illumination of the person’s duality and of the ideal model that the founding twin couple represents in the original myths. Protected by the gods, the twins (though sometimes seen as evil) bring happiness and symbolize harmony and equity. They are a reminiscence of the origins of the world and they feed a highly fertile imagination in sub-Saharan Africa. This idea that everyone is searching for his alter ego, his complementary soulmate - his twin - constitutes the very popular theme in West Africa of the double portrait often equated with a twin portrait. A portrait in which the individual does not disappear in favor of the double but, on the contrary, grows with his 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 by inventing their own modernity and their history. A thought animates this “image-maker,” an intermediary between the visible and the invisible: to attain, 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 2000, at his Studio Photo Gangal in Mopti, a considerable body of work. It comprises portraits but also images of celebrations and ceremonies, first in black and white then in color. Yoruba born in Nigeria, he initially worked as a tailor and trader. In Mali by the late 1950s, he stopped in Gao in 1962 where he was trained by the Nigerian photographer Mahamane Awani, then in Bamako where he connected with 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 from photographers and artists. His keen, tender, and amused gaze rested on his fellow citizens in a wide variety of portraits. The Fulani, Bozo, Dogon, Sarakole, Bella and Yoruba came to the Kodak Photo Studio in Mopti (a very commercial city at the crossroads of the Djenné, Timbuktu and Dogon country routes) for the diversity of poses, the numerous props at their disposal, and the quality of the images. At the crossroads of models from Western studio photography and a local traditional heritage, he spread his knowledge in Mali. He is certainly one of the great promoters of the Ibeji portrait, a double-portrayed image created by superimposition developed by the Yoruba in the context of the twins cult. He used 6x6 cameras and then a single-lens reflex for color. If his portraits today testify to the elegance and whimsy of an era, if they are rich historical and anthropological documents on cultures, they are above all the reflection of artistic work linked to 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 Encounters in 2001 and at the Indiana University Art Museum in April 2007. C. Angelo Micheli