Sanlé Sory (1943–2023) - Le Boxeur

Stamped and signed.

Sory Sanlé is a Burkinabé photographer, born in 1943 in Nianiagara in the Republic of Haute-Volta.
Ibrahima Sanlé Sory arrives in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1957. Becoming a journalist and photographer, he also does album cover illustrations.
He opens his Volta Photo studio in 1962, as his country gains independence. He buys a Rolleiflex 6×6, and begins by taking identity photographs and photographs of road accidents for the local police.
Rapidly, he gains fame in Bobo-Dioulasso, which at the time was the cultural and economic capital of the former Haute-Volta, and where young Africans “hungry for modernity” came “to have their portrait taken.”
Produced between 1960 and 1985, his photographic work “testifies to the happiness of a regained freedom and to a social and cultural effervescence unique of its kind.”

Exhibitions
2015: African Folk Art?, Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.
2015: Meeting African Photography, Mérignac Library.
2018: Retrospective, Art Institute of Chicago.
2020: Tête à Têtes - West African Portraiture from Independence into the 21st Century, David Hill Gallery, London.
2020: Bobo Yéyé, Sanlé Sory, Galerie du Château d’Eau, Toulouse.
Photography accompanied by a certificate of authenticity (Galerie Art-Z, Paris), signed by the photographer.